This little article is trying to find the "real user" browsing hits on my Homepage. All logs are gathered in splunk. In the next, "crawlers" is a synomyn for Robots, Crawlers and Spiders - hence non-live machines.

A log sample:

Step - Filter page views

First, we need to filter out what actually is a "view" and not REST, saving pages, uploading stuff etc. For Confluence, all views are in one of 2 forms:

(uri="*/display/*" OR uri="*/viewpage.action/*")

All other URI's are not relevant...

Step - Eliminate all "bots"

Looking into the log files, look at the User Agent string, often these have a Bot-like name, but nowadays, many crawlers acts as a normal browser.

So, we try to eliminate them:

useragent!="*bot*" useragent!="*spider*" useragent!="*facebookexternalhit*" useragent!="*crawler*" useragent!="*Datadog Agent*"

Step - Eliminate Monitoring

Monitoring Tools can fill a lot in the logs, to control and identify these, I have ensured the monitoring tool is monitoring at /display/public/HealthCheckPage.

Hence, to filter it out:

uri!="/display/public/HealthCheckPage"

Step - Eliminate hosts that has looked at robots.txt

To remove hits from IP-Addresses that have looked at robots.txt, I have created a lookup to a csv file:

index=apache robots.txt clientip="*" | table clientip

Stored in the file robots_spiders.csv

root@splunkserver:/splunk/etc/apps/moseisleymonitoring/lookups# head robot_spiders.csv
clientip
"216.244.66.237"
"77.75.76.163"
"77.75.77.62"
"216.244.66.237"
"77.75.78.162"
"216.244.66.237"
"77.75.76.165"
"37.9.113.190"
"106.120.173.75"

Step  - Eliminate all "hard hitting hosts"

As many crawlers use browser like User Agents and acts like real browsers, looking into my logs I see a large number of hits from them, so I have taken the assumption that more than 100 hits on the same URI within 30 days states that it is not a person using a browser:

index=apache AND host=moserver AND (uri="*/display/*" OR uri="*/viewpage.action/*") | stats count by uri clientip | where count>100

Stored in the file hard_hitting_hosts.csv

root@splunkserver:/splunk/etc/apps/moseisleymonitoring/lookups# head hard_hitting_hosts.csv
uri,clientip,count
"/display/ATLASSIAN/JIRA+as+CMDB/","188.163.74.19",125
"/display/ATLASSIAN/JIRA+as+CMDB/","37.115.189.113",138
"/display/ATLASSIAN/JIRA+as+CMDB/","37.115.191.27",121
"/display/ATLASSIAN/JIRA+as+CMDB/","46.118.159.224",101
"/display/public/HealthCheckPage","77.243.52.139",5732
"/display/slangereden/","5.9.155.37",118
"/display/slangereden/","66.249.64.19",140

To sum up - Conclusion

The best search to get the "human" hits:

(uri="*/display/*" OR uri="*/viewpage.action/*") uri!="/display/public/HealthCheckPage" useragent!="*bot*" useragent!="*spider*" useragent!="*facebookexternalhit*" useragent!="*crawler*" useragent!="*Datadog Agent*" NOT [| inputlookup robot_spiders.csv | fields clientip] NOT [| inputlookup hard_hitting_hosts.csv | fields clientip]