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Long-term trends in web server user load

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Long-term trending of user load provides a strong indication of usage and adoption trends for the site. When long-term user load is correlated with resource consumption like cpu, disk, and memory usage, the resulting data can help with capacity planning where usage and adoption is expected to continuously increase. Alternatively, in cases where usage and adoption is expected to increase, but does not, it could be an indicator of a failed marketing campaign, a problematic onboarding or customer experience problem, or a similar problem. For these reasons, you need a search that will enable you to see these trends in user load.

Data required

Procedure

  1. Ensure you are ingesting web server data. This sample search uses the Splunk Add-on for Apache Web Server, but you can replace this source with any other web server data used in your organization. For more information, see About installing Splunk add-ons.
  2. Choose a specific site you want to measure usage and adoption trends on.
  3. Run the following search. You can optimize it by specifying an index and adjusting the time range.
tag=web 
|eval unique_user_info = src_ip.http_user_agent
|timechart span=15m dc(unique_user_info) AS unique_users

Search explanation

The table provides an explanation of what each part of this search achieves. You can adjust this query based on the specifics of your environment.

Splunk Search Explanation

tag=web

Search for events that are tagged as web events.

|eval unique_user_info = src_ip.http_user_agent

Search for unique users to a specified site and name the field unique_user_info.

|timechart span=15m dc(unique_user_info) AS unique_users

Return the distinct count of unique users to a specified site. Plot the distinct count of unique users over time at 15-minute increments.

Next steps

If, over time, the data show an increase in the number of unique users, you might want to show response times on the same dashboard so that capacity planning or optimization decisions can be made and mitigation planned.

Finally, you might be interested in other processes associated with the Managing web server performance use case.