[Yandex Cloud documentation](../../../index.md) > [All solutions](../../index.md) > [Application Load Balancer](../index.md) > How to retrieve the real IP address of the source in request headers

# How to get the real IP address of the source in request headers



## Case description {#case-description}

You need to log external IP addresses of clients establishing connections with the load balancer.

## Solution {#case-resolution}

When traffic is intercepted between clients and servers, the server access logs only contain the IP address of the proxy server or load balancer.

In Yandex Network Load Balancer, the IP address of the remote host initiating the request is visible by default without additional settings unless you use Ingress Controller for Kubernetes. If you are using it, follow [this guide](../../../managed-kubernetes/operations/create-load-balancer.md#lb-create) to manually set `TrafficPolicy: local` in order to preserve actual IP addresses for requests.

When you use Yandex Application Load Balancer, the request source IP address is listed in the `X-Forwarded-For`.
The `X-Forwarded-For` header identifies the origin of the IP address of the user connecting to the web server via an HTTP proxy or a load balancer.

To write external addresses in the web server log, change its configuration.

{% list tabs %}

- Nginx

    If you are running an Nginx web server as a backend, make sure your Nginx service configuration has the `http_x_forwarded_for` variable in the `log_format` section:
    ```
    log_format main '$remote_addr - $http_x_forwarded_for - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                    '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                    '"$http_user_agent" $request_time';
    ```

- Apache

    If you are running an Apache web server as a backend, make sure your Apache service configuration has the `%{X-Forwarded-For}` variable:

    ```text
    Log format config

    LogFormat "%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-Agent}i"" common
    SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-For "^......." forwarded
    CustomLog "logs/access_log" common env=forwarded
    ```

{% endlist %}

After changing the web server configuration and restarting it, you will see the external IP addresses of clients in your logs.
For example, if a request with IP 123.34.56.67 comes to Ingress:

```text
kubectl logs nginx-ingress-nginx-ingress-*****
123.34.56.67 - - [28/Jun/2022:09:11:32 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 615 "-" "curl/7.68.0" "-"
```

In the backend pod log, this address will be listed in the `X-Forwarded-For` header:

```text
kubectl logs -n demo-ns pod/nginx
10.20.129.8 - - [28/Jun/2022:09:11:32 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 615 "-" "curl/7.68.0" "123.34.56.67"
```