Every website or http-application hosted in our environment is fronted by a varnish instance (and a nginx to varnish pair if we talk https). We use it to route traffic to the right backend, but also to introduce some easy – but very effective – caching to boost websites.

Sometimes when dealing with lots of requests to a certain domain you might get interested in with what your varnish is busy and then being able to identify traffic even further. Because of the proxy/cache cascade, it’s usually not very effective to do this on the backend and hence you need to analyze what varnish is busy with.

This is where varnishHostStat might become handy, so that you can see which websites or even which parts of a website are causing which amount of traffic. See the README for a detailed description what it can do.

To be able to easier distribute varnishStats onto our systems, we created a simple SPEC file for EL6 & 7 to package this up and distribute on our systems. So packages can also be found in our yum repository