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logstalgia – website access log visualization tool

Logstalgia is a website traffic visualization that replays or streams web-server access logs as a pong-like battle between the web server and an never ending torrent of requests.

On a regular basis I tail the access.log of my website watching request to jermsmit.com
jermsmit.com

Last night I ran across a awesome log visualizer tool called logstalgia. Logstalgia displays request as small balls of color which travel over the screen to the request which was made. Successful request are bounced back to the host requesting them. Those 404’s are just travel off screen as being missed by the web server which is represented as a paddle moving up and down the screen.

Logstalgia supports several standardized access.log formats used by web servers such as Apache, Lighttpd and Nginx and pretty much any web server log meeting the supported standard formats

NCSA Common Log Format (CLF)
“%h %l %u %t “%r” %>s %b”

NCSA Common Log Format with Virtual Host
“%v %h %l %u %t “%r” %>s %b”

NCSA extended/combined log format
“%h %l %u %t “%r” %>s %b “%{Referer}i” “%{User-agent}i””

NCSA extended/combined log format with Virtual Host
“%v %h %l %u %t “%r” %>s %b “%{Referer}i” “%{User-agent}i””

This tool is available under Windows and Linux, so stop by the project site and have some fun with this. I almost can’t wait to get back to work after the weekend to put this up on a display to watch traffic in real time. Now how cool is that.

Link to the Logstalgia Project Home Site

Check out the YouTube video to see it in action – http://youtu.be/HeWfkPeDQbY

If anyone ask, tell them jermsmit.com sent ya.