Other day I logged in to my Linode dashboard to see some spikes.


And I have no clue what's going on (or what happened 10 hours back?).
All you sys-admins & experts, How your curious mind gets the answers?

How do you check the log? ..not real time monitoring but checking the past events.
What stats/log app do you use on your bare-bone linode? (AWStats/ webalizer etc?)
How to find currently online visitors, the real time? (is there way in PHPMYADMIN-> Status-> server?)
What's the best practices? to be informed.

I'm sorry but whatever I learned is via crude way (not from experts/books etc.)

Thank you, Linode community is awesome!

any guidance, people?
Thank you.

If you're hosting a website, you can check your web server software's access log and error log to see where all the traffic came from and which page(s) they visited. Each entry has a timestamp at the beginning, so it shouldn't be difficult to find entries from a specific time period. It's most likely a search engine that just began to index your website, or a link or hotlink from a popular website like reddit and slashdot.

The location of the logs depends on your distribution and the type of your web server software. In Ubuntu and Debian, look inside /var/log/apache2 for Apache logs, or /var/log/nginx for nginx logs. If the log files are huge, you can use commands like "less" and "more" to scroll through them, "head" and "tail" to pull out a specific number of lines, or "grep" to find entries that match a pattern.

IMO AWStats and Webalizer are both outdated, although some people still use them. A lot of webmasters nowadays outsource visitor statistics to a third party such as Google Analytics. But if the traffic was caused by a search engine, it might not appear in Google Analytics.