One of the most hidden, valuable gems of Heroku is Logplex. It is a log streaming and pub/sub service that takes care of shipping logs from every app running on Heroku to registered consumers. By issuing a simple

heroku addons:add papertrail

on your app, you can tell Logplex to forward all logs from the app to the Papertrail service. Papertrail is one of several logging add-on providers that you can choose as a Heroku developer.

Now, what if you wanted to do some custom processing of your logs? That's easy too! You can tell logplex to forward logs to any destination that accepts either syslog protocol or HTTP based log streams, including your own custom code.

This repo is an example of an HTTP based log drain that you can add to any Heroku app to get simple traffic stats.

You'll need to run this app somewhere. It doesn't have to be run on Heroku, but it's probably the easiest option:

To forward logs from one of your Heroku apps to this drain app, you can add a drain like this:

heroku drains:add -a myapp https://user:$(heroku config:get AUTH_SECRET -a mydrainapp)@mydrainapp.herokuapp.com/log

where mydrainapp app is the app name of your deployment of this repo to Heroku. This presumes that you've deployed this app successfully (using Heroku button or other means).

You can attach this drain app to many apps. It will count number of requests and group them by domain name. If you have one app that receives requests on multiple domains, they will be counted separately. You can get a list of all domains along with total request count like this:

curl -u user:$(heroku config:get AUTH_SECRET -a mydrainapp) https://mydrainapp.herokuapp.com/stats/hosts
{ "my.domain.com": 7654321, "my.otherdomain.com": 1234567, ...}

and you can get request count per minute for a single domain like this:

curl -u user:$(heroku config:get AUTH_SECRET -a mydrainapp) https://mydrainapp.herokuapp.com/stats/host/my.domain.com
{"1419707700":"1234","1419707760":"4321",...}