Extracting number of logged-in users for an external monitoring system

[Jürgen Starek]

We need to monitor the number of logged-in users for several Atlassian products, most importantly Confluence, Jira and Stash. These numbers need to be fed into an external monitoring system (like xymon, Zabbix or similar). How would we best do that, keeping in mind that our Crowd installation has hit a problem and had to be switched to in-memory storage of SSO tokens?

[Andris Grinbergs · Accepted solution]

Hi,

For Jira:

You can capture rate of successfull logins with LOG file reader agent for your monitoring system. Then you can write triggers - for example >100 logins in last 10 minutes.

You should read file atlassian-jira-security.log and count phrases "has PASSED authentication."

BR, Andris.

[Jürgen Starek]

Hi Andris, thanks for the hint! Looking at it, I was wondering if it also logged sessions that become invalid due to a user closing the web browser and clearing their state. Do you happen to know if that is the case? So, for any given point in time, would counting the number of sessions that are logged as "created" but not "closed" reflect the user number correctly, or would I miss those users that only closed their browsers?

[Andris Grinbergs]

I'm not sure if it logs logouts. Probably if you rise log level....

Another option which you can consider is logging open connections to jira/confluence - you can use similar syntax:

netstat -apn|grep ESTABLISHED| grep java|wc -l

[Jürgen Starek]

Hm, you're right, that might be more pragmatical... Thanks for the hint!