I have a JIRA instance running on Tomcat. I am trying to parse the Tomcat Access Log to finally display it in a Kibana Dashboard so that I can monitor the usage.
My typical access log line looks like this :
100.10.10.10 1x756917x1 collabin [12/May/2020:00:01:25 +0530] "GET /rest/api/2/project/ABC HTTP/1.1" 200 4759 466 "-" "-" "11nppm7"
where "collabin" is the user name which is clear for me.
I noticed many other log lines where the user name is just a "-". For example when a user loads a JIRA dashboard:
100.10.10.10 1x756921x1 - [12/May/2020:00:01:38 +0530] "GET /secure/Dashboard.jspa HTTP/1.1" 200 36019 147 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)" "-"
What can be inferred from a user name which is "-" ? Should I monitor the adjacent log lines to get the actual user who loaded the Dashboard ? Or should I treat them as JIRA internal calls and discard ?
I have searched for an answer and what I got is "it is the Remote user that has been authenticated. If there is none, it’s a hyphen (-)". I would be really grateful if you can explain in terms of JIRA.
The - in place of the username indicates no user has been authenticated. This will happen, for example, before the user has logged-in. This is nothing JIRA-specific.