Azure Application Gateway records traffic patterns and useful information in its access log. Different tools such as Azure Log Analytics, Excel, Power BI, and others are used to push this information to Azure Storage.

Common scenarios for traffic analytics are:

  • peak traffic monitoring of the high traffic events
  • debugging and troubleshooting operational incidents
  • analysis of the client statistics
  • top requested URLs monitoring
  • application performance monitoring

Another recent addition for analytics is Application Gateway access logs with the popular open source GoAccess real-time log analyzer framework. Published via Azure Quickstart template this integration provides customers with another choice for getting insights on the AppGW traffic. GoAccess allows multiple output formats such as terminal or HTML and delivers data in a rich dashboard. It is also efficient and lightweight in terms of resources needed to run.

GoAccess HTTP traffic statistics:

  • general statistics: total requests, successful requests, failed requests, and unique visitor count
  • top unique visitors per day
  • HTTP Status codes
  • top requested files
  • top requested URLs
  • 404 URLs
  • visitor stats: visitor hostnames/IPs, client operating systems and browsers used
  • traffic volume distribution over time

Below are the dashboard screenshots:

 

dashboard

Quick setup guide

When deployed Azure Quickstart template does the following:

  • a Linux VM is created
  • GoAccess and a web server are installed and launched
  • the template installs and runs Azure connector that fetches access logs from the configured storage account

Included with the template Readme file contains the description for all the required input values. As soon as the deployment is finished it is necessary to point the browser at the URL http://<Public-DnsNameOfVM>/report.html, where <Public-DnsNameOfVM> is the DNS name provided for the VM in the template configuration.

 

Pro Tip: Get deep and immediate insight into the stability of all of your Azure resources.

Restrictions:

  • GoAcces takes up to 5 minutes to refresh the data once the logs hit an account producing an p to 5 minutes delay in the refresh of the statistics displayed
  • customer is responsible or the VM and bandwidth costs that may be generated

For more details on the template as well as support options, please see the Readme.