I attempted to get a discussion going on ServerFault.com regarding "blackbox" logs and Nginx. It didn't get the response I imagined, and I was told to ask here.

Here is an article about "blackbox" logs in Apache by Chris Josephes from 2004.

http://onlamp.com/pub/a/apache/2004/04/22/blackbox_logs.html

I've always kept these logs around on my Apache servers and they have come in handy. I'm trying to recreate them for Nginx. Here is the Apache format.

LogFormat "%a/%S %X %t \"%r\" %s/%>s %{pid}P/%{tid}P %T/%D %I/%O/%B" blackbox

Here's what Nginx blackbox format would look like, the unmapped Apache directives have question marks after their names. access_log blackbox '$remote_addr/$remote_port X? [$time_local] "$request"' 's?/$status $pid/0 T?/D? I?/$bytes_sent/ $body_bytes_sent' Here's a table of the variables I've been able to map from the Nginx documentation. %a = $remote_addr - The IP address of the remote client. %S = $remote_port - The port of the remote client. %X = ? - Keep alive status. %t = $time_local - The start time of the request. %r = $request - The first line of request containing method verb, path and protocol. %s = ? - Status before any redirections. %>s = $status - Status after any redirections. %{pid}P = $pid - The process id. %{tid}P = N/A - The thread id, which is non-applicable to Nignx. %T = ? - The time in seconds to handle the request. %D = $request_time - The time in milliseconds to handle the request. %I = ? - The count of bytes received including headers. %O = $bytes_sent - The count of bytes sent including headers. %B = $body_bytes_sent - The count of bytes sent excluding headers, but with a 0 for none instead of '-'. So, I'm missing %I bytes received and %X keep alive status. The timings are off, but I don't mind. Nginx doesn't to milliseconds like Apache, but rather seconds with millisecond precision. Making the log format exactly like the Apache blackbox log format would be a nice exercise, but it is not imperative. If Nginx can do simple adjustments using multiplication that would be cool, but I haven't tried it yet, nor have I seen any examples of it. Alan Gutierrez - http://twitter.com/bigeasy