Skip to content

HTTP request origin logs

HTTP request logs show data about each request that bypasses VIP’s edge network of servers and reaches a site’s origin server.

To access HTTP request origin logs, enable Log Shipping for an environment in the VIP Dashboard. The Log Shipping feature automatically ships logs to a configured cloud bucket on a regular cadence. Shipped logs are delivered as a series of gzipped JSON files.

An example JSON-formatted record in a shipped HTTP request origin log file:

{
  "body_bytes_sent": "199724",
  "datacenter": "dfw",
  "http_host": "example.go-vip.net",
  "http_referer": "https://example.go-vip.net/",
  "http_user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/144.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
  "http_version": "HTTP/1.1",
  "http_x_forwarded_for": "200.9.112.251",
  "remote_user": "-",
  "request_id": "3df5dde32076e201952b89e1075ddf60",
  "request_time": "0.000",
  "request_type": "GET",
  "request_url": "/wp-content/themes/twentytwentyfour/assets/images/example.webp",
  "sent_cache_control": "-",
  "status": "200",
  "stream": "stdout",
  "time": "2026-02-09T18:47:08.135796924Z",
  "timestamp_log": "09/Feb/2026:18:47:08 +0000",
  "true_client_ip": "-",
  "wplogin": "exampleusername"
}

Description of fields

FieldDescription
body_bytes_sentThe number of bytes (excluding headers) sent in the HTTP response body
datacenterAn abbreviated value of the global location of the data center that handled the request
http_hostThe domain name value and, if present, the port number (e.g. example.com:8080) of the Host HTTP request header sent by the client
http_refererThe Referer request header, if available, contains the purported address of the web page from which a link to the currently requested page was followed.
http_user_agentThe contents of the User-Agent request header
http_versionHTTP protocol version
http_x_forwarded_forThe x-forwarded-for header value is a record of the source IP address of each proxy server through which the request passed through. The leftmost proxy value in a series is most likely to be the client’s originating IP address.
remote_user If the request was authenticated with HTTP Basic Authentication, this is the username value (the password is not logged).
request_idUnique request identifier. This value is set in the x-request-id HTTP request header which can be read by a WordPress or Node.js application.
request_time The amount of time taken for the request
request_typeThe HTTP method (e.g., GET, POST).
request_urlThe path of the resource that was fetched, not including elements that are included elsewhere such as the protocol (e.g. http://, see scheme), and the domain (e.g. example.com, see http_host).
sent_cache_controlThe contents of the Cache-Control HTTP response header.
statusThe HTTP response status code (e.g. 200, 404, etc.)
streamEither stdin or stdout
timeUTC date and time of the logged request in ISO format
timestamp_logThe timestamp of the request logged by NGINX in UTC date and time format
true_client_ipA request header commonly set by reverse proxies, including Cloudflare, to indicate the remote address of the client for which they are forwarding requests (see also: http_x_forwarded_for).
wploginThe login name (i.e. user_login) of the authenticated WordPress user, if any. For requests without an authenticated WordPress user this field will contain -.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

Relevant to

  • Node.js
  • WordPress