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Web logs are, in my experience, under-utilized. People new to running their own web server in particular don't always realize how much useful information can be found in the logs, and how much more they can gather if they set up a custom log format. To help, we have some articles on working with web logs and web server troubleshooting.

First on our list is the topic of finding and reading web logs, for apache and nginx:

Reading apache web logs

Reading nginx web logs

Once you've looked an access log over it can help to know what the status codes it records mean and what can cause them:

Interpreting common status codes in web logs

If you want to add more detail to what gets recorded in the logs, or want the server to create additional logs to hold those details (like the time the server took to return a request or the contents of cookies when requests are sent), this will help:

Customizing apache web logs Customizing nginx web logs

And Lee brings it all together with an excellent guide to troubleshooting server outages that you should keep handy:

Solve Slice or Website 'Down' Issues Quickly

If you have questions about anything from those articles, or anything that has nothing to do with those articles, we have techs in support chat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, ready with answers.

Thanks for reading!