I have a couple IIS servers behind a load balancing device. The client IP in
the IIS logs always displays as the load balancer's IP address. Therefore,
log analysis software cannot identify number of visitors. I have sites
serving over 20,000 pages a day, but since the software cannot identify
separate visitors, I'm only showing between 2 - 4 visitors a day.
I've been thinking about how i can help the software out. if I massage the
IIS logs files and l modify the client IP address. I believe that the analysis software will identify that as a new sessions and collect appropriate information such as visitor count and referrer.
My thoughts are to change the client IP when the referral address is
- blank
- not equal to the home URL ( base url of the site )
I would have a script run through the log file and save it to a new
location. I would configure the log analysis software to read the rewritten
log files instead of the original files.
I understand that I will not have accurate information for the amount of
traffic going to each visitor, or on repeat visitors. But I believe I would get a lot more usable information such as numnber of visits and more referrer information.
Does this make sense?
Do you see any glaring problems with this?
Any other suggestions?
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I'm assuming you are using an appliance rather than the built in Windows Load Balancing Services?
Have you tried setting the Advanced IIS logging options to see if you can get more granular detail for the hits? meverst is correct you can get cookie information there as well as the User Agent which might help you parse the data further.
>> - We need to masquerade the IP address due to the way we have our DMZ configured.
OK, "need" wasn't meant to be this is the only way we can get it to work. The need is to meet our infosec requirements. We have a multi-tiered DMZ and unless there are specific application requirements, all inbound traffic needs to be relayed at each DMZ level. I guess you'd say beyond a load balancer, the device is also used to proxy the IIS servers.
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by: meverestPosted on 2009-09-17 at 18:00:57ID: 25362372
Hi,
there are two suggestions that I would like to make:
1. if you log the cookies (look at advanced properties of logging config) then you can detect individual users by session cookie (if your web site uses sessions)
2. it is not a requirement of load balancing systems to masquerade the real remote IP address. Take a closer look at the load balancing arrangement and seriously consider fixing it so that is only forwards the requests - this will also take at least half the load off your load balancers because they no longer need to proxy the incoming requests.
Cheers, Mike.