Monitoring Apache with mod_status

I was put into a situation at office where i had to check if apache was crashing or not, hits on vhosts, and etc, so i enabled mod_status and went ahead with it. Here is an excerpt from an article that helped me getting started:

When you have an Apache server serving multiple virtual hosts it becomes difficult to keep track of what it’s serving at each moment – because in most cases each virtual host will log to a different place, you cannot read all the logfiles simultaneously.

There are tools which will process a single apache logfile, and show you what is happening with a particular virtual host for example apachetop – but this will not allow you to view two or three virtual hosts at the same time.

If you’re interested in this kind of information you’ve got a couple of choices:
Log all virtualhosts to the same access.log file
Use mod_status to allow a real-time viewing of all the server’s activity.

Using mod_status you get to see:

The number of children serving requests

The number of idle children

The status of each child, the number of requests that child has performed and the total number of bytes served by child

A total number of accesses and byte count served

The time the server was started/restarted and the time it has been running for

Averages giving the number of requests per second, the number of bytes served per second and the average number of bytes per request

The current percentage CPU used by each child and in total by Apache

The current hosts and requests being processed

Monitoring Apache with mod_status

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