Basically, Apache has a nice page whe
re you can view the statistics, number of processes, processed requests, etc etc. Lots of information.
How to enable it?
Check the 'server-status' lines in httpd.conf (default location in RHEL installation is /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf).
You also need to enable 'extendedstatus'. Search for both those values in httpd.conf and you'll find them.
P.S: The number of apache processes returned by 'ps aux' is not always the number of connected users. Depending on your configuration, it could be idle children waiting to process a request. So your technique is kind of flawed