Apache custom logging

Aren’t you interested in seeing what requests users, bots, or script kiddies make of your site, especially those things that client-side JavaScript-based analytics packages don’t tell you?

Under Apache, custom logging can give you lots of information you might not have seen otherwise. I’ll let the documentation for Apache’s mod_log_config say most of this, but as a quick preview, you could try defining a custom log format up near the top of your httpd.conf with

LogFormat "%a %t %{Host}i \"%r\"" hostlog

for example, then in all of your Directory containers, you could do

CustomLog logs/forest-monsen-site-host-log hostlog

Then, in my case, /var/log/httpd/forest-monsen-site-host-log would contain lines like
192.168.0.3 [31/Aug/2010:08:53:24 -0500] www.forestmonsen.com "GET /aggregator/sources/2 HTTP/1.0"
192.168.0.5 [31/Aug/2010:08:53:24 -0500] www.forestmonsen.org "GET /images/house.gif HTTP/1.1"


And I’d be able to tell which hostname was originally requested by the user — before any of my mod_rewrite rules got to it. Good stuff.