Chapter 6. Managing Squid and Monitoring Traffic

In the previous chapter on log files, we learned about the different types of log messages generated by Squid and the various log files containing the different types of log messages. So, in the last few chapters, we have learned about running a Squid proxy server and interpreting the various log files. As it's not convenient to manually check log files every time, and as it's almost impossible to analyze traffic by manually going through the log files, it's time to explore Squid's cache manager which is a web interface which is used to monitor and manage the proxy server. We'll also look at a few log file analyzers that can directly parse log files generated by Squid and then present a statistical analysis of web pages browsed by clients.

In this chapter, we shall learn the following:

• Using cache manager (web interface)

• Installing the external log file analyzer software

So, let's get started.