Action logs and system monitoring
Action logs collect user actions. System monitoring collects information about the performance of the Spotfire Server and the services. Information from action logs and from system monitoring is written to the same files or database; therefore, you can use the data you collect to correlate the usage with the system performance.
Action logging and system monitoring are disabled by default.
- To log such information from Spotfire Server, you must enable writing to files, to a database, or to both files and database.
- To also log information from non-server nodes, such as information from Spotfire Analyst, Automation Services and Spotfire Web Player (from Business Author and Consumer users), then you must configure Spotfire Server to accept incoming log events through web service calls.
- If you write the logs to a Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle database, you can choose to import the enclosed library import file, which contains information links for logging categories, as well as a sample Spotfire analysis file to your library. The information model and analysis file can easily be configured to read the logs from the database and it is a good starting point to analyze the logs.
| Action logging and system monitoring | Comments |
|---|---|
| Writing to files. | Log files are not pruned. By default, a new log file is created every day; although you can change the action log interval, you must ensure that there is free space in the file system. |
| Writing to a database. | You can set an option to remove entries that are older than a certain number of hours.
Spotfire provides an information model and an analysis file that you can use to start analyzing usage patterns.
Tip: If you are logging to a database then it might be a good idea to involve your database administrator to regularly monitor the usage and see if indices should be rebuilt or dropped. If no pruning is turned on, then manual pruning or partitioning must eventually be performed on the database.
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| Capturing service logs. | You can specify the service or services for which to capture logging information. If you do not configure any web services, only actions performed on the server are logged. |
You can enable and configure Spotfire Server for action logging and system monitoring either from the command line or from the configuration tool.
- To enable and configure action logging and system monitoring from the command line, follow the steps under Configure action logging using the command line.
- To enable and configure action logging and system monitoring using the configuration tool, follow the steps under Configure action logging using the configuration tool.
Note that the log points represent what is happening on the system. This means that there might be cases where what is shown in the log is not directly connected to a user action. For example, when using NTLM, you might see more login actions than expected. If you follow what is happening on the network during a normal session, you will see that several logins will take place during the session. Another case is when a session is automatically closed. There is a maximum life span for a session and, in the logs, you will see an event even if the user has not actively closed the session. You can also see that there might not be a session when these events are logged, because the session has already ended.