Managed Hosting for WordPress - Retrieving and analysing your logs

Objective

A log is an event recorded on a computer system (server, application, website, etc.). For a website, logs typically record each HTTP request received, the response returned, the client that issued the request, and how long the request took to serve.

Your Managed Hosting for WordPress solution generates logs for the websites it hosts and forwards them to Logs Data Platform, where you can store, visualise, and query them.

Unlike a raw log file, the logs sent to Logs Data Platform are split into individual fields (HTTP method, status code, client IP address, response time, etc.). This means you do not have to parse a single text line yourself: each piece of information is already available as a dedicated, searchable field.

Find out which logs are available for your Managed Hosting for WordPress solution and how to exploit them.

Requirements

• A Managed Hosting for WordPress solution with at least one website.
• Access to the OVHcloud Control Panel.
• Basic knowledge of Logs Data Platform (EN).

Instructions

Available log kinds

Your Managed Hosting for WordPress solution forwards two distinct types of logs to Logs Data Platform:

Each entry is enriched with information identifying the website it relates to, so you can filter the logs of a single site even when several sites share the same stream:

• service_id: the identifier of your Managed Hosting for WordPress service.
• website_id: the internal identifier of the website.
• fqdn: the domain name (virtual host) targeted by the request.

Viewing and forwarding your logs

You can preview your most recent logs directly in the OVHcloud Control Panel and subscribe to Logs Data Platform to store, query, and visualise them. Click the tabs below to view each of the 2 steps.

Step 1

Step 2

Go to the Managed Hosting for WordPress page in your OVHcloud Control Panel, then click Manage under the resource concerned.

Open the Logs tab. Select the log type to display (for example HTTP access logs) to preview your most recent logs in real time. To forward them to Logs Data Platform, click Subscribe in the Stream panel on the right.

HTTP access log fields

For each HTTP request, the following fields are available. The field names follow the Logs Data Platform naming conventions (EN): the suffix indicates how the value is typed and indexed (_ip is geolocated, _int is an integer, _num is a number, _date is a date).

PHP-FPM log fields

The PHP-FPM kind is lighter and exposes the following fields:

Querying and analysing your logs

Once your logs reach Logs Data Platform, you can explore them through the Graylog web interface included with your solution, build dashboards, and set up alerts. For the basics, refer to the Quick start with Logs Data Platform (EN) guide.

Because the access logs are split into typed fields, you can run targeted searches directly from the Graylog search bar. A few examples:

• Display the requests of a single website:

website_id:a1b2c3d4e5

• Find every server error (HTTP 5xx):

http_status_int:>=500

• Identify slow requests that took more than one second to serve:

request_duration_num:>1000

• Monitor brute-force attempts on the WordPress login page:

http_path:"/wp-login.php" AND http_method:POST

• Filter traffic by the geolocated country of the client (provided by the _ip suffix):

remote_host_ip_country_code:FR

Go further

• Discover Managed Hosting for WordPress
• Introduction to Logs Data Platform (EN)
• Quick start with Logs Data Platform (EN)
• Logs Data Platform field naming conventions (EN)

For specialised services (SEO, development, etc.), contact OVHcloud partners.

Join our community of users.