mqweb – who did what to what, when, and how long did it take?

You can provide an audit trail of the http requests coming into your server.  This is described in the base liberty document, and works in mqweb.

Within the httpEndoint tag you can add

<httpEndpoint host=”${httpHost}” httpPort=”${httpPort}” httpsPort=”${httpsPort}” id=”defaultHttpEndpoint”>
<httpOptions removeServerHeader=”false”/>
<accessLogging enabled=”true” filePath=”${server.output.dir}/logs/http_access.log”
logFormat=’a:%a A:%A D:%D h:%h HeaderHost:%{Host}i HeaderOrigin:%{Origin}i m:%m R:%{R}W t:%{t}W u:%u U:%U X:%{X}W r:”%r” s:%s’
maxFileSize=20
maxFiles=0
/>
</httpEndpoint>

See here for information on the accessLogging,  here for the syntax of the <accessLogging…> and here for the logFormat format options.

From the logFormat page

%a

Remote IP address

%A

Local IP address

%b

Response size in bytes excluding headers

%B

Response size in bytes excluding headers. 0 is printed instead of – if no value is found.

%{CookieName}C

The request cookie specified within the brackets, or if the brackets are not included, prints all of the request cookies.

%D

The elapsed time of the request – millisecond accuracy, microsecond precision

%h

Remote host

%{HeaderName}i

HeaderName header value from the request

%m

Request method

%{HeaderName}o

HeaderName header value from the response

%q

Output the query string with any password escaped

%r

First line of the request

%{R}W

Service time of the request from the moment the request is received until the first set of bytes of the response is sent – millisecond accuracy, microsecond precision

%s

Status code of the response

%t

NCSA format of the start time of the request

%(t)W

The current time when the message to the access log is queued to be logged in normal NCSA format

%u

Remote user according to the WebSphere Application Server specific $WSRU header

%U

URL Path, not including the query string

%{X}W

Cross Component Tracing (XCT) Context ID

So

logFormat=’a:%a A:%A D:%D h:%h HeaderHost:%{Host}i HeaderOrigin:%{Origin}i m:%m R:%{R}W t:%{t}W u:%u U:%U  r:”%r” s:%s’

gave me

• a:127.0.0.1 remote IP address
• A:127.0.0.1 local host
• D:225960 duration in millisecond
• h:127.0.0.1 remote host
• HeaderHost:127.0.0.1:9443 the Host header
• HeaderOrigin:- the Origin header (missing in this case)
• m:GET request method
• R:186930 Service time of the request from the moment the request is received until the first set of bytes of the response is sent
• t:[27/Feb/2020:17:04:27 +0000] NCSA format of the start time of the request
• u:colinpaice remote user
• U:/ibmmq/console url path
• r:”GET /ibmmq/console HTTP/1.1″ First line of the request
• s:302 Status code of the response

There are other log formatting options available, I picked those I thought were most useful.

Note when using the MQConsole from a browser, the interface is chatty. I had 20 request to refresh one window.

Other ways of formatting the data

• I separated each field with a ‘,’ and could read it into a spread sheet.
• You could configure your log format string to produce the output in JSON format, to make it easier to post process.