When it comes to collecting HTTP traffic logs, redirection.io is one of the best solutions on the market: once installed, you get all the HTTP traffic logs of your website in real time, and you can use them to analyze user behavior, monitor website performance, and debug issues.

Collecting logs has been one of redirection.io's core features since the beginning and we've been working hard to make it as efficient and reliable as possible. To achieve this, we have been using a lot of different technologies and experimenting with a lot of solutions. As a result, we have recently taken some steps towards making our logs feature the most efficient and reliable it can be and we thought it would be interesting to share the improvements with our community.

Introducing Log View Counters

Two years ago, we added the concept of "Logs views", which was an innovative way to save individual logs screen configurations as bookmarks, so that users could easily access their preffered view at all times. This feature became very popular, and many of our users utilize it to monitor specific parts of their website, or only a range of HTTP status codes, user agents, etc.

Since then, we've been thinking of interesting ways to go further and to add some kind of "counters" to the logs views allowing users to see the number of logs in each view more easily.

Today, we are enabling, for all our users, the new "Log View Counters" feature, which is a way to "pin" several clickable log view counters at the top of the logs screen, so that you can see the number of logs that match the log view. This is a very simple feature, but it is very useful, and we hope that it will help you to better understand your HTTP traffic logs.

Logs timeline navigation

Also, it is a shame that our logs GUI did not easily allow you to navigate in the logs history - this is now fixed and we have added "back" and "forward" buttons to the logs screen, so that you can easily navigate in the timeline.

New filters and aggregations

Some new filters and aggregations are available in the logs explorer, so that you can better understand your HTTP traffic logs. Of course, all these filters can be used in combination with log views, so you can prepare specific traffic views that match your business and your website structure.

For example, we have added the ability to filter logs by "Path" (see only the requests for which the path starts with /blog), "Referrer Host" (which domains to the visitors come from?) or "Query params" (did the URL of the request contain a query parameter?).

Customers using our fully managed instances or the redirection.io agent in reverse proxy mode can also display and filter requests by their "Duration", which is basically the time it took for the backend to process the request. This duration is measured at the redirection.io agent level, from the moment the agent receives the request to the moment it begins to send the response to the client. This is a very useful metric to monitor the performance of your website, and to detect slow pages. This metric can be used to inspect the performance of the redirection.io agent when it comes to performing redirections: most of the time, you should see a 0 ms. duration of such requests, as the agent is able to perform redirections almost instantly.

Faster logs exports

Since day one, we have allowed the export of traffic logs in CSV format. Recently, we've made several changes in our logs storage infrastructure which have resulted in a faster logs export feature. You can now export logs in a matter of seconds, even very large logs sets.

More logs per day

Historically, there has been a limit of 2 million rows per day (even for free projects), in order to avoid performance issues and offer a quality service to all our users. We've even allowed temporary bursts in order to accept traffic peaks. In the current situation, we collect and process every day several billions of HTTP requests.

Since September 2023, we allow to extend the logs retention duration, so our customers can have an insight on their detailed logs for up to 12 weeks. This has been a great step forward for SEO consultants, as this allows them to cover a complete Googlebot exploration window and get clear insights of the traffic fixes priorities: which 404 errors did Googlebot encounter, which pages are the most crawled, where is the crawl budget consumed, etc.

However, we were still missing the ability to upper the amount of logs that can be loaded in a project each day. This was a bit problematic for some of our customers, who have very high traffic websites and who wanted to collect all the logs of their website - the over quota logs were dropped, and this was a bit frustrating as it translated into a flat traffic chart and eventually a loss in the traffic errors collection.

This is now a thing of the past, and "Pro" plan customers can now request higher daily traffic logs limits. We will not detail why collecting an exhaustive view of traffic logs is important from a SEO perspective, as this has already been covered in many other articles, but we are happy to offer this new feature to our customers.

👉 Please contact us if you wish to increase your daily logs quota.

We always love to hear from our customers, and we are always happy to help you to better understand your HTTP traffic logs. Please contact us if you have any questions, if you need some help to extract information from your logs or if you have ideas of features that you would like to see in redirection.io. We are working hard to improve the logs explorer and have many new improvements coming in the next months, so stay tuned!

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, safeguarding your online assets is of paramount importance. Whether you're protecting sensitive data, ensuring the privacy of your users, or simply maintaining control over your web services, having robust security measures in place is essential. That's why we're thrilled to introduce a new feature in our SaaS platform - Multiple Project Keys - designed to give you greater control and flexibility over your projects in redirection.io.

The Project Key: The Project Configuration Secret

Before diving into the new feature, let's first understand the significance of the "project key." This unique string is the linchpin of your redirection.io project. It's the secret sauce that binds an instance to a specific project, allowing it to access and interact with the associated rules and logs. By default, every project receives a project key, which you can directly use to configure your redirection.io agent instance. However, there are scenarios where having multiple project keys can be helpful.

Why Multiple Project Keys Matter

Here are a few compelling reasons why you might want to utilize multiple project keys:

• Enhanced Security: If your project key becomes public knowledge, it could pose a significant risk. With multiple project keys, you can rotate or change keys as needed to maintain the utmost security.
• Development-Production Segregation: To maintain a clear separation between development and production environments, you can use specific project keys for each. This way, your development team can work without access to the production project key, ensuring data integrity.
• Key Expiration: Sometimes, you might want a project key to have a limited lifespan. With the option to set expiration dates on project keys, you can control when they stop working.

Introducing Multiple Project Keys

redirection.io now offers the capability to create as many project keys as you require. Each project key can be customized with a name, helping you clarify why it was created, and an optional expiration date, ensuring it ceases to work after a set time.

Key Rotation for Improved Security

If you suspect that your project key has been compromised or simply want to enhance security, our platform makes it easy to rotate project keys. Here's how you can do it:

1. Create a new perpetual project key that will serve as the replacement.
2. Add an expiration date to the old project key, ensuring it will no longer function after that date.
3. Update your instance configurations with the new project key.

The graphical interface also displays the last time a project key was used, allowing you to determine when it's safe to remove the old key. This way, you can rest assured that all your instances have been updated, and the old project key is no longer in use.

The introduction of Multiple Project Keys in redirection.io is a significant step forward. With this feature, you can enhance the security of your projects, maintain clear separations between environments, and have full control over the lifespan of your project keys. To learn more about this feature, check out our documentation about instances and project keys.

We're thrilled to announce a game-changing feature - "Managed Instances" - designed to simplify your experience with redirection.io.

Historically, redirection.io was a self-hosted hybrid product, which means that users had to install the agent on their own servers. Now, with Managed Instances, we offer a hosted version, taking the hassle out of infrastructure management. Basically, users must configure their domain name to target it to our infrastructure, and it works in minutes.

• target your domain DNS to our servers
• works in minutes
• automatic SSL is provided

Shortly said, a redirection.io managed instance is a redirection.io agent server hosted on the infrastructure provided by redirection.io. It is capable of handling redirects for your blank domains, and can also act as a reverse proxy for your websites, with all the redirection.io superpowers inside.

Multiple deployment modes

Along with our historical "hybrid" deployment, and the "On-Premise" deployment mode, we cover a very flexible and large range of situations, making redirection.io the most versatile SEO reverse proxy out there:

Fully managed SaaS

• everything on our servers
• works in minutes

Hybrid SaaS & hosted

• the redirectionio-agent is installed on your infrastructure

On premise

• the whole platform is deployed on your own servers

Benefits of Managed Instances

redirection.io managed instances are a great option for users who don't want to manage their own infrastructure, or who don't have the technical skills to do so. But there are other key benefits to using managed instances:

• Automatic SSL: Managed Instances automatically generate SSL certificates for your domain names (using Let's Encrypt). It takes seconds, saving you from certificate management complexities.
• Global Presence: Our infrastructure spans multiple Points of Presence worldwide, ensuring lightning-fast redirection rule execution for your end users.
• Hassle-Free: No need to manage your own infrastructure. Simply configure your domain name to point to our infrastructure, and we'll handle the rest.
• High Availability: Managed Instances are replicated across multiple data centers, offering a highly available service without any management on your part.

We are very happy with the results so far, and we are looking forward to have more users using it. The technology behind it is very solid, and we are confident that it will scale well - it has been designed for this. Each managed instance is isolated from the others, both in terms of data management or CPU consumption, and we have a lot of monitoring in place to ensure that everything is working as expected.

Cost and Availability

Managed Instances come at no additional cost compared to our standard plans. They're available to all users, regardless of their subscription plan. You can create Managed Instances directly in the manager, under the "instances" section.

There are however some restrictions on the number of managed instances that can be created, depending on the plan, and on the amount of bandwidth that a project can use each month. These limits and quotas are described in our documentation.

Getting Started

Managed instances have been in production for several months now, and we have already many customers using it successfully. The use cases are very diverse, from small websites to large e-commerce websites:

• Redirect blank or naked domain names.
• Create a company URL shortening service.
• Get all the powerful features of redirection.io without installing any components on your website. It's compatible with various platforms, including major eCommerce SaaS solutions, GitHub Pages, Vercel, Netlify, Shopify, and more.

Setting up Managed Instances is a breeze. We provide extensive documentation to guide you, and our dedicated support team is ready to assist with any questions.

Ready to simplify your redirection.io experience? Reach out to us, and we'll enable Managed Instances for your project. You can also read more about managed instances in our documentation.

Join the growing community of users who have already embraced this convenient and efficient way to manage the traffic of their website. We're excited to have you on board!

We're thrilled to announce a valuable addition to our service - the "Additional Logs Retention" feature, designed to empower you with more control and insights over your data.

Traditionally, logs were stored for 1 to 2 weeks, depending on your plan. However, we understand that analyzing your traffic over a more extended period is often essential. That's why we're excited to offer this feature to our "Starter" and "Pro" plans, allowing you to retain logs for up to a generous 12 weeks.

Why is this important?

• Real-time Data: With redirection.io, traffic logs are collected in real time, ensuring you always have access to the freshest data.
• Deep Analysis: For users who seek comprehensive insights, having access to logs on a longer period lets you dive deep into your traffic patterns and behaviors.
• Compliance: For those with compliance requirements, extended logs retention helps you meet your obligations by maintaining a historical record of your traffic data.
• SEO Audits: SEO audits often recommend analyzing logs over a complete search engine crawling window, which can span up to two months. Now, you can easily align with these recommendations.

How to Extend Logs Retention:

• Starter Plan: Project administrators can effortlessly extend logs retention directly in the manager under the project billing section.
• Pro Plan: Administrators can simply get in touch with their dedicated redirection.io account manager to discuss and implement the logs retention extension.

Unlock the power of extended logs retention today, and gain deeper insights into your traffic. Your data, your control! ➡️ Read more in our documentation

Have questions or need assistance? Reach out to our support team anytime. We're here to help you make the most of this new feature.

Thank you for choosing redirection.io for your traffic management needs. Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements coming your way!

We have recently improved the the redirection.io rules system by introducing negation support for the "Method" and "Backend Response Status Code" triggers, providing you with greater flexibility and control over rule execution.

In a redirection.io rule, Triggers define the conditions that incoming HTTP requests must meet for the rule to be applied. For example, the "Method" trigger filters requests based on the HTTP method used, while the "Backend Response Status Code" trigger allows you to restrict triggering based on the status code generated by your backend application.

With our latest update, you can now utilize negation for these triggers. For example, you can define rules that trigger when the HTTP method is not GET or POST, or when the backend response status code is not 200 or 301. This new capability enables you to refine your rule logic and execute specific actions based on negated conditions.

The feature is immedialtely available for the customers who use our "hosted instances" or the managed Cloudflare workers. Other deployment modes (nginx or Apache modules, agent reverse proxy, manually added Cloudflare worker, Fastly Compute@Edge, etc.) needs to be updated to use at least the redirection.io agent 2.7.0 or libredirectionio 2.8.0.

To learn more about negation support and explore other features of the redirection.io rules system, refer to our documentation about triggers. We value your feedback and are continuously working to improve our services based on your needs. Thank you for choosing redirection.io as your trusted solution for efficient traffic management!

We have released lately the version 2.7.0 of the redirection.io agent, our software designed for logging HTTP traffic, analyzing requests and performing responses transformations. In this release, we've introduced new configuration directives that further enhance the agent's capabilities. These directives provide greater control and flexibility over the logging of access logs, the utilization of HTTP keep-alive between the agent and the backend, and the configuration of backend request timeouts.

Here are the key additions in version 2.7.0:

• keep_alive.enabled: With this directive, you can enable or disable the HTTP keep-alive feature between the agent and the backend. By default, this feature is enabled, ensuring optimal performance. Adjusting this setting allows you to fine-tune the agent's behavior to match your infrastructure needs.
• timeout: This directive allows you to configure the timeout duration, in seconds, for backend requests. By default, this feature is disabled, but with this new directive, you can restrict the maximum time a connection will remain opened to your backend. This is particularly useful for optimizing the performance of your infrastructure in case your application suffers performance issues on certain paths.
• access_log: This directive allows you to enable or disable the logging of access logs in the specified log locations. By default, access log are disabled, giving you the flexibility to enable it based on your specific requirements.

These new features are documented in the "agent configuration reference" documentation page. To benefit from the improved performance and added functionalities, we encourage all our customers to keep their redirection.io agents up to date. By doing so, you'll always have access to the latest features and enhancements, empowering you to streamline your traffic management and maximize efficiency.

👉 read more about the update process

We're pleased to announce the addition of the Aggregated Logs Details Panel to the redirection.io manager. This new feature brings convenience and efficiency to your analysis of HTTP traffic logs, allowing you to delve deeper into your most frequent requests.

In the logs screen of the manager, you can already group requests by various criteria like URL, HTTP method, response status code, and user agent. However, we've now made it even better by enabling the display of details for grouped requests.

For example, if you want to examine the most frequently requested URLs, simply group the requests by URL and click on a specific URL. You'll instantly access a comprehensive list of matching requests, complete with a preview of the most recent ones. You can easily navigate through these requests using the intuitive "next" and "previous" buttons.

This small yet handy feature provides valuable insights into your traffic logs, allowing you to quickly identify any issues or patterns. It's perfect for troubleshooting or conducting in-depth analysis.

We strive to make your experience with the redirection.io manager as seamless as possible, and Aggregated Logs Details is another step towards achieving that goal.

If you have any questions or need assistance, our support team is ready to help!

We are thrilled to announce a new feature in redirection.io that will make managing your sitemap.xml files easier than ever before. Our new "Sitemap management" feature is now available for "Pro" plan subscribers and allows you to define the content of your sitemap files directly within redirection.io.

Creating and managing sitemap files is an essential part of website management. However, it can often be a time-consuming and manual process, especially for larger websites. With our Sitemap management feature, you can avoid the need for developers to deploy a new version of the website every time a sitemap.xml file needs to be updated. This feature is useful in many professional contexts when the sitemap.xml management is not fully automated.

With the new redirection.io Sitemap action, you can easily define the content of your website's sitemap.xml file(s) directly from redirection.io, and serve it at the location specified in the "Source URL" trigger.

By using redirection.io to manage your sitemap files, you can improve your productivity and focus on more important tasks. This feature, combined with the redirection.io crawler, guarantees better reactivity and the ability to cover all the pages of your website, which in turn improves your website's SEO. Additionally, you can configure several sitemaps using this action, which is perfect for larger websites or for keeping sitemaps properly sorted.

To get started with Sitemap management in redirection.io, upgrade to our "Pro" plan today. And as always, let us know your thoughts and feedback! We're excited to see how this feature will help you better manage your website!

We strongly believe that using the redirection.io manager is a nice way to manage the traffic of websites at scale, and that it offers many nice features to create redirects or traffic management rules.

However, there are some cases where you would want to avoid using the graphical interface to create redirection rules:

• to create a large number of rules, if the CSV import format is not flexible enough for your requirements;
• to create a rule when a given event occurs (for example, when the URL of one page changes in your Content Management System);
• when you want a complete control over the created rule (attach many markers, use complex triggers or actions, etc.).

There are indeed many cases where it may be desirable to be able to create rules without human intervention! This is why we have launched, earlier this week, a new version of our public API. In a few words, the newly available API endpoints allow to retrieve the projects of an organization, list both the published and draft rules, create, edit or delete rules (and drafts), publish the draft changes.

The API supports all types of triggers, actions, markers and variables - which means that web traffic automation can be taken to another level!

An OpenAPI specification is available at https://api.redirection.io/docs.json and a tutorial has been published in our documentation. Let us know your feelings about our API!

👉 API documentation: https://api.redirection.io/

After growing requests from our customers for an ARM version of the redirection.io agent, we will now propose such ARM builds in our packages repository.

ARM is a processors architecture which can be used as an alternative to the more traditional x86 architecture. Many Cloud providers now propose ARM instances, which can sometimes offer a better price/performance ratio, and can be a good solution to host the redirection.io agent as a reverse proxy.

The ARM version of the redirection.io agent is available as a tar.gz archive in our repositories, from the new release 2.4.2 and for all future releases. For example, the version 2.4.2 is available in the folder https://packages.redirection.io/dist/stable/2/any/2.4.2/ (see the "aarch64" files):

Index of /dist/stable/2/any/2.4.2/
../
redirectionio-agent_2.4.2-1_any_aarch64.sha256sum    08-Sep-2022 15:03         188
redirectionio-agent_2.4.2-1_any_aarch64.sig          08-Sep-2022 15:03    10424675
redirectionio-agent_2.4.2-1_any_aarch64.tar.gz       08-Sep-2022 15:02    10526417
redirectionio-agent_2.4.2-1_any_amd64.sha256sum      08-Sep-2022 14:50         186
redirectionio-agent_2.4.2-1_any_amd64.sig            08-Sep-2022 14:50    10012569
redirectionio-agent_2.4.2-1_any_amd64.tar.gz         08-Sep-2022 14:50    10084589"

The latest version of the stable agent is also always available in https://packages.redirection.io/dist/stable/2/any:

• for x86: redirectionio-agent-latest_any_amd64.tar.gz
• for ARM 64: redirectionio-agent-latest_any_aarch64.tar.gz

We do not propose distribution-specific packages for these ARM versions for the moment, so you will have to build your own systemd unit service file to run the agent. However, the agent tar.gz archive contains a redirectionio-agent.service systemd file, that you will usually want to put under /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants:

[Unit]
Description=Redirectionio Agent
Documentation=https://redirection.io
After=network-online.target remote-fs.target nss-lookup.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Environment=RIO_PATH_CONF=/etc/redirectionio
WorkingDirectory=/var/lib/redirectionio
Restart=always

User=redirectionio
Group=redirectionio

ExecStart=/usr/bin/redirectionio-agent --config-file ${RIO_PATH_CONF}/agent.yml

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

You are now ARMed to perform smooth redirections on your website! ✨