Quinn's Blog

Analyzing historical apache log data using piwik

August 22, 2014

There are various tools that provide log anaslysis for apache. Of the ones I was able to find piwik seemed like the best. it seems well maintaned and seemed to support themy specific use case well.

Installation

The easiest way I found to install piwik was using Docker:

docker run --name piwik -p=10000:80 -v=/mnt/piwik:/data quinn/piwik

Import logs

Get your apache log file from where it is stored. Usually, it is in a directory such as /var/log/httpd/access.log or something similar. Given a file named access.log, run this:

docker-enter piwik
./import_logs.py --url=http://docker-002.tastehoneyco.com/ access.log --idsite=1 --recorders=2 --enable-http-errors --enable-http-redirects --enable-static --enable-bots

Now reindex the data:

./console core:archive --force-all-websites --force-all-periods=315576000 --force-date-last-n=1000 --url=http://docker-002.tastehoneyco.com:10000/

Now navigate to the visits tab within the piwik interface and you should see all of the apache request logs. Piwik provides great filtering and sorting functionality to help you find any unusual traffic. Next, you may want to emulate some nefarious traffic of your own. Read our install guide for metasploit, a tool for finding and testing vulnurabilities in your infrastructure.