Installing ECC > Logging in ECC

Logging in ECC

This topic briefly explains how logging is handled in ECC and how to change the default log level setting. For information about the kind of log data to collect for an Automic Support ticket, see "Preparing Log Files for Error Reporting".

If errors occur, the logging information can help you finding the source for the error. For example, the ECC logging includes information on the user session that caused the log entries as well as user names. Logging is enabled by default, you can change the default log level, if you want more or less event occurrences written to the log file.

Logging in the ECC is handled by the Tomcat logback framework. You can define the log level in the logback.xml file. The specified log level defines the lowest severity. Its occurrence and the occurrence of events of higher severity are logged. Extensive logging, however, can impact ECC's performance. When you encounter performance problems, check your log level and reduce the written messages by specifying a higher log level, if necessary.

Logging involves the following files:

logback.xml configuration file webapps\<ECC>\config folder of your Tomcat web application server.
Log files in the logsfolder of your Tomcat web application server.

Changing the Log Level

Logging is enabled by default set to DEBUG, but, if necessary, you can change the log level in the logback.xml configuration file that you find in the webapps\<ECC>\config folder of your Tomcat web application server.

Do not change any other parameters in this file. Changing other parameters might prevent Automic from investigating situations that cause errors.

The log level is defined in the<root> element by the level="[log_level]"> element The <root> element contains the <appender-ref> element that specifies that this<root> element defines the LOGGER appender. The LOGGER appender is the component that writes the logging events to the log file.

Steps....

Switch to the webapps\<ECC>\config folder and open the logback.xml.
Search for the <root> element.
You can find the <root> element best by searching for ref="LOGGER". The <root> element is one line above.
Change the log level for the root appender by setting the level="[log_level]" attribute to the lowest log level for which you want messages to be written to the log file. See the "LogLevels" table for more information.
For the changes to take effect, stop and restart your Tomcat web server.

Example

The log level is set to "DEBUG" (default value) in the following example. If you change it to "INFO", fewer messages are written to the file, as non-critical log messages are ignored.

<!-- Log level is set here. Possible values: TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR

DEBUG is recommended on testing and development instances.

INFO is recommended on production instances.

-->

<appender-ref ref="LOGGER" />

</root>

LogLevels

The following table lists the available log level values (highest to lowest).

Log Level	Purpose	Tracing Data in Message
ERROR	Failure of some action of an ECC component that ECC was not able to recover from, such as `nullPointExceptions` or `closedStreamExceptions`.	No user-identifying data. However, hostnames, other site-specific data, class names, object names, and the like are included with the event related specifications. The message contains the full stack trace.
WARNING	Unexpected behavior of an ECC component, such as unstable network connections that require auto-reconnect from ECC, a post-timeout retry, or triggering of a workaround for a third-party bug .	Same as ERROR level
INFO	Configuration values at login or component startup, or global configuration changes.	Same as ERROR level but without the full stack trace.
DEBUG	High-level user-specific actions such as login/logout events, user changes (such as object edits), authorization related events (such as successful/failed setup actions), and important performance measures	User information (such as user ID and HTTP session ID) and event related specifications.
TRACE	Low-level user-specific actions such as navigation, object open, button clicks, the payload of backend-calls, internal application events, and all calls to the backend.	Same as DEBUG.

Logback.xml

Before you update your ECC from a previous version, you should back up your config files so that you can restore them once the update i done. The Logback.xml is an exception to this.

Please make sure that you do NOT copy the old logback.xml over the new one when copying back the old version's config files from the backup, otherwise you will overwrite important improvements done to the Logback.xml.

ECC Log Files

The log files in the logs folder of your Tomcat web application server are named as follows:

<host name>_ECC_Log.##.TXT where

<host name> is the computer's name where the Tomcat web server is running#.
## is an ascending number. 00 is the current log file.

The current log file is a .txt file, older log files are compressed in .zip archives.

Your administrator can also enable writing trace files (similarly named as the log files (<Host name>_ECC_TRACE.##)) to this folder. Your administrator might need them to find the cause of an error.

Automic Documentation - Tutorials - Automic Blog - Resources - Training & Services - Automic YouTube Channel - Download Center - Support