Accessing Statistics

The command line utility traffic_ctl offers a text based interface for viewing Traffic Server statistics. Invocation is simple and requires knowing the specific name of the statistic you wish you view:

You may notice that this is the same utility, and argument, used for viewing configuration variables of a running Traffic Server instance. Unlike configuration variables, you cannot modify a statistic value with the traffic_ctl program.

This utility is enabled and built by default, and will be located in the subdirectory of your Traffic Server installation. There are no required changes to your configuration to allow traffic_ctl to function, however it may only be run by users with permissions to access the Traffic Server Unix socket. This will typically limit use to root as well as the system user you have configured Traffic Server to run under or any other system users which share the same group as you have configured Traffic Server to use.

Stats Over HTTP

To enable the plugin, you must add the following to your plugin.config:

Once the plugin is enabled and Traffic Server has reloaded, you can test that it is working properly by issuing a simple HTTP request with . Assuming your Traffic Server installation is using the default interface and port bindings, running the following command on the same host as Traffic Server should now work:

You should be presented with an HTTP response containing a single JSON object which lists all the available statistics and their current values. If you have configured Traffic Server to only listen on a specific interface, or to use a different port, you may need to adjust the URL in the command above.

The above entry will result in your Traffic Server statistics being located at on any host and port on which you have your Traffic Server instance listening.

Statistics Security and Privacy

Simply changing the path at which your statistics are available should be considered very weak security. While cache objects themselves cannot be accessed through the plugin’s JSON output, and no modifications to the configuration or operation of Traffic Server may be made through the plugin, the statistics may reveal much more about your network’s traffic and architecture than you wish to be publicly available.

A better method is to use an in remap.config to restrict access to clients. For instance, if your Traffic Server host resides on a private network in the 10.1.1.0/24 IPv4 address space listening on the address 10.1.1.10, separate from its public interface(s) used to serve client requests, you could add the following remap configuration: