Introduction

Website logs are an important asset when it comes to understanding vital information about your website. It allows users to track down suspicious activity on their websites, identify crawl behaviour from bots, monitor traffic spikes, verify whether a specific URL has been visited, or troubleshoot site errors. Regardless of the reason you need to view these logs, Plesk provides built-in tools to view and manage them from the convenience of its easy-to-use dashboard.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to locate and review your website’s logs using the Plesk control panel.

Let’s dive right in!

Accessing the Plesk Logs Section

To start scraping your access logs in Plesk, please ensure you have logged in to your Plesk control panel. To do that, please enter your IP address, hostname, or domain name inside your browser search bar and add “:8443” at the end. It should look something like: https://yourdomain.com:8443. By doing that, you will be prompted by a login form requesting your username and password.

Once logged in, Plesk will automatically display the “Websites & Domains” page, which will be the index every time. In the middle, you will see a table section containing a list of all your websites. Please expand all the available tools by clicking the little pointed down arrow at the far left side of the row corresponding to the website you want to check the log for.

Performing this action will display all functionalities you have at your disposal with which you can manage your website. 

To navigate to the logs, please click on the “Dashboard” tab and from there, please click on the “Logs” icon.

Breakdown of the Plesk Website Log Interface

The first time you land on this page, you may get confused, as there is a lot going on there! Do not fret! We will explain everything in detail so you can understand and eventually start using this interface with great success. The Plesk Website Log interface provides a convenient way to monitor logs directly from within. By default, it will show the following logs for the selected domain:

• Apache Error Log

• NGINX SSL/TLS Access

• Nginx Error

• Nginx Access

• Apache Access

• NGINX SSL/TLS Access

However, you can disable the information from one of these logs using the “Logs” drop-down menu, located in the top right corner of the table section, located right in the middle of the screen. 

In addition to removing log entries, you can also add custom logs you have created for your website. To do that, please click on the “Add custom log” button at the bottom of the drop-down menu. 

Performing this action will open up a pop-up window, allowing you to select the log you want to show the entries for from the files located on your Plesk web hosting account.

How to read log entries in the Pleks Website Log Interface

Now that we have clarified which log entries you can expect by default from this interface and how you can populate the output with additional logs if needed, let us break down all the columns in the table section so you can actually read a log entry properly.

• Date - Under this column, you will see a timestamp of when the request to the website occurred.
• Type - Under this column, you will see the type of log that was recorded, it can be an “error” which means that an error occurred, a “warning”, which means that something happened that requires your attention, even though it is not critical and “access” which shows that your the entry logged that the request simply accessed your website.
• IP - Under this column, you will see the IP address that triggered the request.
• Code - Under this column, you will see the response code of the request. There are many response codes, but the most common ones are “200”,  which signifies that the request was successful, “404”, which means that the resource was not found, and “403”, which shows that the resource is forbidden. 
• Message - Under this column, you will see the message of the request. In the context of log entries, a request’s message typically refers to the text or data that describes the nature of an HTTP request made to a server.  You will typically see the HTTP Method (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE), the request URL path(/index.php), and the version of the HTTP protocol (HTTP/1.0) used by the client that submitted the request.
• Referrer - Under this column, you will see the webpage URL linked to the requested resource, or in other words, where the request came from, specifically, the previous page the user or client was on before making the request.
• Agent - Under this column, you will see the “User-agent” that made the request. A user-agent can be the type of browser the client used to make the request, or it could be a web crawler or a bot, such as GoogleBot, Bingbot, or Mozilla/5.0.
• Size - Under this column, you will see the size of the request, or in other words, the amount of data sent by the client to the server, typically measured in bytes. This includes the size of the request headers, the request body, or the request line itself.
• Source - Under this column, you will see the log from which this entry came from. For example, if you see “Apache Access”, this was the log that added this entry to the interface.

A useful feature of the log interface is that you can enable real-time updates and view the entries as they come without having to refresh the page. To do that, please click on the “Start real-time updates” button, located on the top left of the table section. 

To stop this behaviour, please click on the button again, which will have transformed into the “Stop real-time updates” button. When you have this feature stopped, if you wish to populate the table section with the newest requests, please click on the “Refresh” button located on the right side of the “Stop/Start real-time updates” button.

Filtering Log Entries

So far, we have familiarized ourselves with the Pleks Log Interface and how to refresh or enable/disable real-time logging. Now, it's time to learn how to filter out the logs we need and crunch the numbers, so to speak, allowing you to see only the log entries you are interested in.

The Pleks Log Interface filtering tools are located just above the table section. They are represented by text fields and drop-down menus, allowing you to define specific parameters to filter out the log entries. 

The filters you can use are as follows:

• Date (Timestamp)
• Type
• IP address 
• Code
• Message

To help you better understand, let’s give an example. Let’s say you are looking for a specific IP address and want to check if it has visited your website. You have recently started using a third-party service that is delivering its service via the same IP address. Please navigate to the Pleks Log Interface and type it inside the “IP” text field. In our example, we have typed in an IP address we normally use, and as you can see from the screenshot below, Pleks will immediately filter out the logs and present only the entries that contain this IP address.

As you can see, we get a mixed bag of response codes and entry types. There is a lot going on with this IP address!

Now that we have covered how to access the Pleks Log Interface, provided a breakdown of the available actions there, and discussed how to read the log entries and filter them, it's time to look at how to manage the log files themselves and change their rotation.

Manage Log Files & Log Rotation

To manage log rotation, from the Pleks Log Interface page, please click on the “Manage Log Files” button located on the right side of the “Refresh” button.

Performing this action wil redirect you to a page where you will see a table section with all the logs listed inside. Let’s break down the table’s sections’ content and all available tools on this page, starting with the ones above the table section.

• Modification date - The information under this column will contain the date this log file was last modified
• Name - The information under this column will contain the name of the log file.
• Path - The information under this column will display the path to the log file on the server.
• Size - The information under this column will display the size of the log file.

• Add Custom Log - Please click on the “Add Custom Log” button, located at the top right side, above the table section, to add a new log to the list inside the table section. Clicking on the button will open a pop-up window allowing you to choose a log file located on the Plesk file system. We went over the same process earlier during the Plesk Log Interface page breakdown. 
• Log Rotation - Please click on the “Log Rotation” button to change the log rotation. In other words, log rotation means managing the logs by archiving, deleting, or compressing them to prevent them from growing indefinitely and causing disk space issues. Furthermore, bloated logs will make them harder to filter and scrape; thus, having everything tightly managed will make your life easier. Clicking on this button will open a pop-up window with a couple of settings inside. Please note that custom logs are not rotated; thus, these settings will only apply to the default logs supported by Plesk.
• Log Rotation - Please tick this checkbox if you wish to enable log rotation. By default, this will be checked. 
• By size - Please use this radio button to rotate the logs by size. Underneath the radio button, please type in the size (in KB) at which the log will rotate when it reaches it. This is the default option, and the default size is 10240 KB or 10.24 MB.
• By time - Please use this radio button to rotate the logs by time. When you select this option, the drop-down menu below will become active, and you may choose the Weekly, Monthly, or Daily rotation cycle.
• Maximum number of log files - Please use this text field to define the maximum number of log files Pleks should store at a time. The default value is 10.
• Compress log files - Please use the checkbox here to enable log compression. This option is enabled by default, and we recommend keeping it as such, as compressing the logs will save disk space.
• After Plesk retrieves data from log files of web and FTP servers, email the log files to this address -  Please use this text field to type in an email address where you would like Plesk to email you these logs once they are rotated.

Finally, when you are done configuring the log rotation, please click on the “Ok” button located in the bottom left corner of the pop-up window.

• Remove - Please use this option to remove log files from the list of logs that Pleks entries for. Note that you can always re-add the logs you deleted back. 

Now, look at the available tools on the right side of the table section. 

• Download - Please use the checkboxes on the left side of the table sections, corresponding to the log you want to select, and then click on the green arrow pointing down icon to download the selected log file to your device.
• View the log file in a new window - Please use the tickbox on the left side of the table section, corresponding to the log you want to select, and then click on the blue page icon to open the logs in a separate browser tab and view them directly there in text format.

This exhausts all the available actions you can perform with your logs inside the Pleks Log Interface.

Conclusion

There you have it! A thorough breakdown of how to view your website’s logs, filter them, and manage them in the Plesk control panel. We hope the information was helpful, and our comprehensive tutorial gave you the insight to read log entries yourself and look for the knowledge required to evaluate the information within.