[squid-users] Ideas for Squid statistics Web UI development

Hello

I've started development of open sourced Web UI for gathering stats
for Squid proxy server and need your help to clarify needs and
resources.

Where it came from:
Enterprises require auditing, reporting, configuration
check/visibility and statistics. I can say that most of these things
are easy to implement and provide in different ways, except reporting
and stats. Additionally, there are some requirements in functionality
and nice interface not met by currently available solutions that I've
found. Also, state of maintenance, future development etc are very
unclear and Ineffective, but still acceptable or enough for _some_
installations. If you know something that can do all this stuff -
please let me know.
So, I've decided to write everything from the scratch, maybe will take
some public-licensed part from other projects.

Architecture:
Starting point is gathering stats, then we need to manipulate and
store it, then we can add some regular jobs (will avoid this) and then
we need to view this.

Gathering data
Available sources:
1. Logs, available via files or logging daemon (traffic, errors)
2. Stats available via SNMP (status/counters/config)
3. Cache Manager (status/counters/config)
4. OS-level things (footprint, processes, disk, cpu etc)
[anything else?]

This part will be done by local logging daemon, I won't use file
logging for known reasons.
BTW, good starting point is log_mysql_daemon by marcello, available in
GPL, written in perl. Effective enough to start and load any data to
DB - it's simple enough and took for me 10-15 minutes to analyze the
code, setup and configure.

Data storage
File-based logging is very ineffective and has several huge disadvantages:
- Ineffective use of disk resources
- Poor/no indexing
- Logrotation/DWH/archiving
- Not human readable, some parts need calculations anyway
- etc

For optimized storing and then viewing of data It's actually required
to have DB. For first step I'll use MySQL, then will migrate the code
to support PgSQL (and maybe others too) through DB abstraction layer.

We can store all of the access logs and also have some dynamically
updated counters, because periodic jobs are very intensive and require
time too.

I don't want to put counter-updating code on the logging daemon, will
try to use DB-side for that as it's done in log_mysql_daemon.

If someone will need this data for monitoring purposes not available
via SNMP/OS through Nagios/Cacti/Zabbix/whatever - I see no problem to
do that too.

Web UI
Technologies: PHP/CSS/JS/Ajax etc
PHP will select data from DB and generate pages accordingly.

TODO:
1. Collect information about UI requirements - what users want to see
and control
2. Define all the counters, logging variables for daemon part required
for implementing first needs, according to P1
3. Define DB-side counters, sources
4. Check data types and lenght for DB for optimization
5. Continuous improvement

Any involvement: information about user needs, suggestions,
recommendations, coding, ideas are appreciated :)

I chose GitHub for hosting the project, will write project docs and
plans there. Currently I am collecting a very detailed information on
user needs.

Thanks

Best regards,
George Machitidze
Received on Mon Nov 19 2012 - 00:06:25 MST