Access Watch is a flexible access log processor that helps operators analyze the web traffic reaching their infrastructure.

Access Watch is built on a real-time stream processor handling logs from inputs of any type:

• CDNs (Cloudfront, Cloudflare, Akamai, ...)
• Load Balancers (ELB)
• Reverse Proxies (Nginx, Haproxy, ...)
• Web Servers (Nginx, Apache, ...)
• Applications (Node, Ruby, PHP, ...)

Access Watch is currently in open beta. For more details, go to: https://access.watch

Install

Make sure you have Node.js version >= 7. We recommend using nvm.

git clone https://github.com/access-watch/access-watch.git
cd access-watch
npm install

Start

npm start

It's loading the default configuration, it's the same as:

npm start config/default

Configure

The first thing you might want is configuring inputs to connect Access Watch to your traffic sources and convert it in the proper format.

In order to do this, you need to create a new configuration file such as config/custom.js.

See Input Configuration for the list of available input types and how to configure them.

There are also a couple of constants you might configure with a simple config file, to learn more you can head to Constants Configuration.

Start with custom configuration

npm start config/custom

The Access Watch API and interface will be served from port 3000 by default.

You can change that using an environment variable:

PORT=80 npm start config/custom

Browse the interface

Now, you can point your browser on the address:port where Access Watch is running, for example http://localhost:3000/.

If you see data flowing, congratulations you made it!

Warning: There is currently no built in authentication mechanism, if installed on a public server, you need to properly configure a firewall to restrict access to it.

Tutorials

• Monitor web traffic with syslog input from Nginx
• Monitor web traffic with syslog input from Apache
• Monitor web traffic with input from Node/Express middleware
• Monitor web traffic with input from Elasticsearch

License

Apache License, version 2