End-to-end tracking of HTTP requests¶

In order to track individual requests through the whole chain of involved components (nginx, Varnish, HAProxy), we have introduced a custom HTTP header (X-Request-ID) that is added to each request in our nginx installations:

../../_images/loghost_kibana_request_id.png

Note

The value is computed from nginx’ PID, the connection number, and the request number in this connection. It is reasonably unique but might be re-used later.

Tracking an individual request is done by entering its :code:request_id in Kibana’s search field:

../../_images/loghost_kibana_request_id_search.png

This shows two matching entries, one from nginx, the other one from HAProxy.

You might want to integrate your application here. To do so, see here. You can then extract the header from the request reaching your application to generate a logstash event that contains the request_id field and others with the information you need.