cPanel WHM Failed to Receive Status Information From Apache Error

cPanel web hosting control panel provides easy access shortcut in WHM (WebHost Manager) to check server status. One of the server status components is Apache Status which calls apachestatus script to display important information about Apache HTTPD web server, such as server version, built, uptime, restart time, total accesses, CPU usage, amount of requests and etc. However, you may encounter the following error message when you click on “Apache Status” link:

Failed to receive status information from Apache.

Administrators may also get the following error line in Apache error log: [error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist: /usr/local/apache/htdocs/whm-server-status.

The error message only appears on cPanel 11, whereas in earlier version of cPanel, a blank page is returned.

The cause of this error is due to missing location declaration in configuration file for /whm-server-status which is required by apachestatus script to retrieve status and information of Apache web server. whm-server-status location defines how should Apache handles the access request to the path. The lines may get deleted or removed if there is a mistake during Apache compilation process, especially when using Apache Update under Software in WHM.

To resolve the problem, simply add back the location declaration lines of whm-server-status to the httpd.conf file, normally located in /etc/httpd/conf/ or /usr/local/apache/logs. These lines can be added anywhere in the configuration file (but not within VirtualHosts declaration. Ideally, it should be placed before the virtual hosts declaration section.

<Location /whm-server-status>
SetHandler server-status
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Location>
ExtendedStatus On

The last line, “ExtendedStatus On” tells Apache tol generate full detailed status information instead of just basic information when the “server-status” handler is called “whm-server-status”.