GoAccess

What is it?

GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that *runs in a terminal in nix systems. It provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual server report on the fly. More info at: http://goaccess.io.

Features

GoAccess parses the specified web log file and outputs the data to the X terminal. Features include:

• General Statistics, bandwidth, etc.
• Time taken to serve the request (useful to track pages that are slowing down your site)
• Top Visitors
• Requested files
• Requested static files, images, swf, js, etc.
• 404 or Not Found
• Hosts, Reverse DNS, IP Location
• Operating Systems
• Browsers and Spiders
• Referring Sites
• Referrers URLs
• Keyphrases
• Geo Location - Continent/Country/City
• Visitors Time Distribution
• HTTP Status Codes
• Ability to output JSON and CSV
• Different Color Schemes
• Support for large datasets and data persistence
• Support for IPv6
• Output statistics to HTML. See report.

Nearly all web log formats...

GoAccess allows any custom log format string. Predefined options include, but not limited to:

• Amazon CloudFront (Download Distribution).
• Apache virtual hosts
• Combined Log Format (XLF/ELF) Apache | Nginx
• Common Log Format (CLF) Apache
• W3C format (IIS).

Why GoAccess?

The main idea behind GoAccess is being able to quickly analyze and view web server statistics in real time without having to generate an HTML report. Although it is possible to generate an HTML, JSON, CSV report, by default it outputs to a terminal.

You can see it more as a monitor command tool than anything else.

Installation

GoAccess can be compiled and used on *nix systems.

Download, extract and compile GoAccess with:

$ wget http://tar.goaccess.io/goaccess-0.9.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf goaccess-0.9.tar.gz
$ cd goaccess-0.9/
$ ./configure --enable-geoip --enable-utf8
$ make
# make install

Build from GitHub (Development)

$ git clone https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess.git
$ cd goaccess
$ autoreconf -fiv
$ ./configure --enable-geoip --enable-utf8
$ make
# make install

Distributions

It is easiest to install GoAccess on Linux using the preferred package manager of your Linux distribution.

Please note that not all distributions will have the lastest version of GoAccess available

Debian/Ubuntu

# apt-get install goaccess

NOTE: this might not always give you the latest stable version. To make sure that you're running the latest stable version of GoAccess see alternative option below.

Official GoAccess Debian & Ubuntu repository

$ echo "deb http://deb.goaccess.io $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
$ wget -O - http://deb.goaccess.io/gnugpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install goaccess

Fedora

# yum install goaccess

Arch Linux

# pacman -S goaccess

Gentoo

# emerge net-analyzer/goaccess

OS X / Homebrew

# brew install goaccess

FreeBSD

# cd /usr/ports/sysutils/goaccess/ && make install clean
$ pkg_add -r goaccess

pkgsrc (NetBSD, Solaris, SmartOS, ...)

# pkgin install goaccess

OpenBSD

# cd /usr/ports/www/goaccess && make install clean
# pkg_add goaccess

Windows

GoAccess can be used in Windows through Cygwin.

Storage

There are three storage options that can be used with GoAccess. Choosing one will depend on your environment and needs.

GLib Hash Tables

On-memory storage provides better performance at the cost of limiting the dataset size to the amount of available physical memory. By default GoAccess uses GLib Hash Tables. If your dataset can fit in memory, then this will perform fine. It has average memory usage and pretty good performance. For better performance with memory trade-off see Tokyo Cabinet on-memory hash database.

Tokyo Cabinet On-Disk B+ Tree

Use this storage method for large datasets where it is not possible to fit everything in memory. The B+ tree database is slower than any of the hash databases since data has to be committed to disk. However, using an SSD greatly increases the performance. You may also use this storage method if you need data persistence to quickly load statistics at a later date.

Tokyo Cabinet On-Memory Hash Database

Although this may vary across different systems, in general the on-memory hash database should perform slightly better than GLib Hash Tables.

Command Line / Config Options

The following options can be supplied to the command or specified in the configuration file. If specified in the configuration file, long options need to be used without prepending --.

Command Line Option	Description
-a --agent-list	Enable a list of user-agents by host.
-c --config-dialog	Prompt log/date configuration window.
-d --with-output-resolver	Enable IP resolver on HTML
-e --exclude-ip=<IP>	Exclude one or multiple IPv4/v6 including IP ranges.
-f --log-file=<filename>	Path to input log file.
-g --std-geoip	Standard GeoIP database for less memory usage.
-h --help	This help.
-H --http-protocol	Include HTTP request protocol if found.
-i --hl-header	Color highlight active panel.
-M --http-method	Include HTTP request method if found.
-m --with-mouse	Enable mouse support on main dashboard.
-o --output-format=csv,json	Output format: -o csv for CSV. -o json for JSON.
-p --config-file=<filename>	Custom configuration file.
-q --no-query-string	Remove request's query string. Can reduce mem usage.
-r --no-term-resolver	Disable IP resolver on terminal output.
-s --storage	Display current storage method. i.e., B+ Tree, Hash.
-V --version	Display version information and exit.
--444-as-404	Treat non-standard status code 444 as 404.
--4xx-to-unique-count	Add 4xx client errors to the unique visitors count.
--color-scheme=<1,2>	Color schemes: 1 => Default grey, 2 => Green.
--date-format=<dateformat>	Specify log date format.
--double-decode	Decode double-encoded values.
--geoip-city-data=<path>	Same as using --geoip-database.
--geoip-database=<path>	Path to GeoIP database v4/v6. i.e., GeoLiteCity.dat
--ignore-crawlers	Ignore crawlers.
--ignore-panel=<PANEL>	Ignore parsing and displaying the given panel.
--ignore-referer=<referer>	Ignore referers from being counted. Wildcards allowed.
--log-format="<logformat>"	Specify log format. Inner quotes need to be escaped.
--no-color	Disable colored output.
--no-csv-summary	Disable summary metrics on the CSV output.
--no-global-config	Do not load the global configuration file.
--no-progress	Disable progress metrics.
--real-os	Display real OS names. e.g, Windows XP, Snow Leopard.
--sort-panel=PANEL,METRIC,ORDER	Sort panel on initial load. See manpage for metrics.
--static-file=<extension>	Add static file extension. e.g.: .mp3, Case sensitive.
--time-format=<timeformat>	Specify log time format.
--keep-db-files	Persist parsed data into disk.
--load-from-disk	Load previously stored data from disk.
--cache-lcnum=<number>	Max number of leaf nodes to be cached. [1024]
--cache-ncnum=<number>	Max number of non-leaf nodes to be cached. [512]
--compression=<zlib,bz2>	Each page is compressed with ZLIB
--db-path=<path>	Path of the database file. [/tmp/]
--tune-bnum=<number>	Number of elements of the bucket array. [32749]
--tune-lmemb=<number>	Number of members in each leaf page. [128]
--tune-nmemb=<number>	Number of members in each non-leaf page. [256]
--xmmap=<number>	Set the size in bytes of the extra mapped memory. [0]

Usage

The simplest and fastest usage would be:

# goaccess -f access.log

That will generate an interactive text-only output.

To generate full statistics we can run GoAccess as:

# goaccess -f access.log -a

To generate an HTML report:

# goaccess -f access.log -a > report.html

To generate a JSON file:

# goaccess -f access.log -a -d -o json > report.json

To generate a CSV file:

# goaccess -f access.log -o csv > report.csv

The -a flag indicates that we want to process an agent-list for every host parsed.

The -d flag indicates that we want to enable the IP resolver on the HTML | JSON output. (It will take longer time to output since it has to resolve all queries.)

The -c flag will prompt the date and log format configuration window. Only when curses is initialized.

Filtering can be done through the use of pipes. For instance, using grep to filter specific data and then pipe the output into GoAccess. This adds a great amount of flexibility to what GoAccess can display. For example:

If we would like to process all access.log.*.gz we can do:

# zcat access.log.*.gz | goaccess
OR
# zcat -f access.log* | goaccess

Another useful pipe would be filtering dates out of the web log

The following will get all HTTP requests starting on 05/Dec/2010 until the end of the file.

# sed -n '/05\/Dec\/2010/,$ p' access.log | goaccess -a

If we want to parse only a certain time-frame from DATE a to DATE b, we can do:

# sed -n '/5\/Nov\/2010/,/5\/Dec\/2010/ p' access.log | goaccess -a

To exclude a list of virtual hosts you can do the following:

# grep -v "`cat exclude_vhost_list_file`" vhost_access.log | goaccess

For more examples, please check GoAccess' man page: http://goaccess.io/man

Contributing

Any help on GoAccess is welcome. The most helpful way is to try it out and give feedback. Feel free to use the Github issue tracker and pull requests to discuss and submit code changes.

Enjoy!