Tech

I'm an international hit (and you are too) II: Reloaded

Alex Popell

22 Nov 2020 • 3 min read

The past few days I've been playing around with getting better monitoring and analytics for this site (and consequently learning about how to use monitoring and analytics). I chose a program called Splunk for this service, since I already have a pair of their branded socks.

With a logo this good, you can't go wrong

Getting it working and containerized was sort of a pain, but we're in business and I have nearly unlimited metrics to gauge my site performance by. My blog has been accessed (excluding some stuff I'll discuss below) 5803 times in the 19 days its been up:

Don't worry, I'll have a second wave of popularity, right?

November 11^th was the day I started serving errors to anyone outside Canada, the States, the EU, Great Britain, and Australia. 6.94% of my overall traffic ended up returning a status of 444 which is an error code I give to anyone from outside the allowed countries. Of my top 7 sources of traffic, 1 was from a known malicious IP.

Wow, I've got actual people visiting (or at least North American hackers)

What about my Polish friend?

You might remember my Polish fan from my previous analytics post. Well it seems that all 119 of their requests took place on November 8^th in a single 36-second period:

He's quick, and he doesn't get the job done.

The top spot of biggest fan, as you can see from the picture in the last section, is the only unobfuscated IP address, hailing from the Russian Federation and continuing to attempt to access my website despite me serving him nothing but 444 errors no matter what he asks for. He's been trying every day since Monday November 8^th, a total of 471 times so far, and has shown true dedication to the Apopiverse (8.12% of all my traffic).

Don't worry, I've set up an alert for when he stops trying, and will surely post about it.

Outliers

I've done some manipulation behind-the-scenes on the stats to exclude outliers. This includes traffic relating to applications that I run on my network talking to each other about how to do their jobs and entertain me/automate my life, and of course, traffic originating from my no-good co-workers and their interactions with my site.

For example, these 6502 events from Friday November 20^th

Teamwork makes the dream work! More together!

which can be broken down into:

5502 requests to my blog in the span of a minute or two to try and screw up my Zoom call quality (it does. I lag. hahahahahahahahahahaha so funny hahahahahahahaha.)
1000 requests to a part of my site called apoplol.xyz/fuckyoualex (which doesn't even exist. Why would I host that? that's sorta the opposite of my message).

Anything else?

Not really. I'm just playing around with stats and analytics, so there will be more posts about this in the future. Probably with cooler dashboards. Maybe with cool colours. Maybe a button. Maybe two buttons.