Acquia uses an internal monitoring tool to perform a log analysis of recent traffic to your website. The analysis breaks down per-hour traffic reports into a table. The log analysis helps Acquia Support analyze changes to your website’s traffic patterns, or to your website’s response to the patterns.

Acquia Support will sometimes provide the output to subscribers to help them understand what changes took place and when. The output file is densely packed with information; the following documentation can help you to interpret its contents.

Data structure

The following example displays what the output can look like:

In the previous list, each line represents the compilation of an hour’s requests. Every column in this line provides information about the traffic seen in this hour.

For more information about HTTP status codes, see List of HTTP status codes.

What to look for

When reading this report, Acquia looks for several indicators, including:

• Did the number of requests spike upward?

• Did the average response time spike upward?

• What requests take a tremendously long time to complete?

• Did the whole ratio between HTTP 2xx/3xx/4xx/5xx status codes change?

• Are there many requests returning HTTP 5xx status codes?

• Does the ratio between good (2xx or 3xx) traffic and traffic returning HTTP 404 status codes warrant a fix to the underlying cause of the HTTP 404 status codes or the usage of the Fast 404 module to lessen their effect?

Acquia Support will generally make recommendations and point out where problems exist based on the preceding statistics. Analyzing data, and comparing it to code deploys, media campaigns, or news events can help you understand where to make optimization changes to your website.

Understanding Acquia log analysis