Apache, FTP, mail and other system services write information on their
functioning to log files. These files are periodically analyzed by the
statistics utility that parses logs and inserts the resource usage
data into the psa database.
Two other utilities, Webalizer and AWstats, also parse the services
logs and generate HTML files with the statistical data.
Details about where the log files reside and how the utilities process
them are given in this chapter.
System Services Logs
System services logs contain traffic usage data and operational details
that might be useful for troubleshooting (for example, errors and access
information).
Logs of the two services that are responsible for Plesk operation,
sw-cp-server and sw-engine, are the following:
-
/var/log/sw-cp-server/error_log- the error log of the
sw-cp-server (web server nginx) . -
/var/log/sw-cp-server/sw-engine.log- the error log of the
sw-engine (PHP process manager PHP-FPM).
The Plesk log file is the following:
/var/log/plesk/panel.log - contains PHP messages and messages
related to the operations of Plesk.
Domain logs are stored in
$HTTPD_VHOSTS_D/system/ <domain_name> /logs/. These are
logs produced by web, FTP and mail services for each domain. Usually,
the $HTTPD_VHOSTS_D variable’s value is /var/www/vhosts. Also,
$HTTPD_VHOSTS_D contains a different path if you changed the
location of virtual host directories using the transvhosts.pl
utility.
To save disk space, Plesk rotates logs: it removes the information
written before a specified date or the least relevant information when
the log size reaches a limit. For more information on logs rotation, see
the section Log Rotation.
Processing Statistics
Once a day, Plesk runs the statistics utility. This gets the
statistical data from the services log files, calculates daily traffic
usage values for each domain and customer, and writes these values to
the DomainsTraffic and the ClientsTraffic tables of the psa
database. You can also run the statistics utility manually to
calculate statistics for all domains or a particular domain. For
details, see the section Calculating Statistics from
Logs.
Webalizer and AWstats are third-party utilities that represent
statistical information from log files in the HTML format. These
utilities store the files for each domain in the subdirectories of
/var/www/vhosts/<domain_name>/statistics. You can view HTML
statistics in the Plesk GUI or make Plesk send them to your email
address. For instructions on how to set up automatic sending of resource
usage reports, see the section Resource Usage Reports.
In addition, you can recalculate statistic for previous months using the
AWstats utility. For instructions on how to do this see the section
Recalculating Statistics for Previous Months.