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Performance Monitoring Apache/Httpd

When monitoring the performance of your Apache web server, you should use system level tools such as top, vmstat, free, netstat and so on. In addition, Apache it’s self has a nice feature called “server-status” which allows you to monitor the Apache performance via a web browser. A screen shot of what you might expect is below:

To enable this feature, you will need to edit the “/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf” file on a Redhat/CentOS server. Check for the correct location of that file if you’re using a different Linux distribution.

Open the configuration file and uncomment the section that follows:

<Location /server-status>
    SetHandler server-status
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from .example.com
</Location>

Notice that the access permissions are highly restrictive. Alter them as need be. For example, to allow everyone from the “192.168.0.0/24” network, you might use the following:

<Location /server-status>
    SetHandler server-status
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 192.168.0.0/24
    Allow from .example.com
</Location>

Restart Apache:

service httpd restart

Now visit the URL “server.example.com/server-status” using your web browser. You will see the server status page. Disable it when you no longer need it.