[cobalt-users] musita - Traffic monitoring for the RaQ

["manitu" <manitu@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

our program "musita" has been mentioned in this list and we saw that there
was some interest in it. One of the readers of the thread in which musita
was mentioned recommended to open a new thread for this. We hope that you
all don't mind us to post commercial stuff to this list. If you do, please
let us know.

We do not know if all readers did follow the other thread so we would like
to introduce our program musita here again. musita stands for "Multi Site
Traffic Analyzer". musita is a traffic monitoring program currently only
available for the Cobalt RaQ2, a RaQ3 version follows soon.

musita is intended only for the server administrator in order to see how
much traffic each customer is consuming / has consumed. musita does produce
easy-to-use html stats which are showing the traffic each virtual site has
produced. The html stats are very extensive. musita does provide statistics
for multiple periods, such as for day, for week, for month and for year.

At any time, you can see the stats for any period, e.g. today you could see
the stats for April, 3rd, or for the week from May, 1st to 6st. All stats
are linked logically so that you can go from the current month to the
respective weeks or to the respective days. musita does also provide a quick
overview page which shows you the traffic within the last two days and the
last two months so that you can quickly check if your current traffic goes
above your average.

All html stats show you a table of all sites that have been accessed within
the selected period. The table shows you the name of the site, the amount of
traffic and the number of hits of that site. For each period you can see the
report (the table) sorted by traffic and alphabetically sorted by the site
name.

The sort type "by traffic" lets you easily find out which of your customers
are consuming the most of your traffic which can help you to lower your
traffic :-) The tables let you directly jump to the respective site so that
you can check what type of site (private, commercial or adult) your
customers have.

musita does update the stats four times each day. It is NOT a permanent
background task, it is run by the cron daemon and then analyzes the log file
and creates the stats. The log file analyzation and html generation does not
consume an amount of time or mem worht menitioning. Even for large log
files, the program does only run for some seconds to do its whole task.

Each time musita generates the stats, it will send you an email to
admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx which shows you the traffic which has been
produced within the last six hours. If you are checking your admin email
account regularly, you can easily prevent huge amounts of traffic, e.g. by
DOD attacks.

Currently, musita only monitors web traffic which should be the most part of
your traffic (okay, if you are trying to open an email service such as
Hotmail or if your customers extensively use anonymous ftp, this could be
wrong :-) We are planning to extend musita to also monitor ftp and mail
traffic. Also musita is currently only available for the RaQ2, but we are
working on the RaQ3 version which should be available very soon.

musita is very easy to install. We provide a PKG file which can be installed
via the GUI of the RaQ2. The only thing you have to do manually, is to
unlock your version with a special kind of serial number (only takes 10
seconds).

The html stats will be available via http://host.yourserver.com/musita. The
stats are protected by your admin password (realized in the same way as the
cobalt GUI does its access control).

musita does also check web traffic if the websites are called by the ip
address instead of by the domain name. In this case, musita does resolve the
ip address to the respective domain name and does count the traffic to the
respective site. It monitors all kind of domains, under each tld (com, net,
org, de, at, ch, whatever you want). It also monitors domain up to any
level, such as www.support.customer.company.com.

For all advanced users: If you have configured some domains manually in your
http.conf or any included conf file, you don't have to worry. musita does
also monitor sites that have not been configured by the cobalt gui. It will
monitor each domain that was served by the apache daemon and will include it
into the stats.

We know that traffic monitoring on the raq was a problem. That was the
reason why we have developed musita. It is intended both for beginners and
for advanced users.

We hope that this introduction was not too long. If there are any further
questions, please feel free to ask. We will answer all questions. If the
other readers don't mind, you can ask them here in the list.


Best regards,
Manuel Schmitt


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____________________________________________________________________
manitu                    Postfach 1622, D-66596 St. Wendel, Germany
                                            mailto:manitu@xxxxxxxxxx
Fax: +49-(0)-6851-839258                       http://www.manitu.net