Counting Web Requests

I manage a ton of web servers. Occasionally I see attempts at flooding the servers with traffic. Typically in a malicious way. Generally these are just small attacks and nothing to write home about. But, I wanted a way see how many times a server was getting a request from a specific IP address.

Obviously this would be very challenging to accomplish by just looking at the logs. So, I put together a small Linux command that will read and count Apache requests based on unique IP addresses.

cat access.* | awk ‘{ print $1 }’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Try it out and let me know what you think!