Dec 8

Written by: Quest Field Team
12/8/2008 9:31 AM

Greetings

Mark Gowdy here.  It's been a while since I posted and I thought I'd share with you one feature I discovered a couple of weeks ago and have found incredibly helpful.  With the latest releases (5.2.3.5 and 5.2.4) of Foglight come some very handy utilities.  Today we're going to talk about one particular feature that reduces the need to log into your management server to see what is being written to the log files.

The LogAnalyzer is a new feature that allows you to see your Foglight Management Server log files and download the files, even if you are not on the Management Server machine itself.  Think of this as a visual tail tool.

To start, expand the Foglight dashboards.  Expand the Diagnostic group to get to the LogAnalyzer dashboard.



The Log Overview dashboard allows to observe your selected log file, download it to your local desktop or refresh the data shown for the selected log file.  To start, click the 'Open other Logs...' button.





This opens the Log Selector dialog, showing you the available log files.  Select the log file of interest to update the Log Overview dashboard.



The log is then inserted into a table, allowing you to sort on the time each row was added, the message level, the source and the description.



Hopefully you are now getting a feel for the power and utility this new feature can provide.  We have used it recently to diagnose an issue with email configuration and were able to resolve it once we saw what was being set, all within a single UI.

If you are interested, you may also want to take a look at the Performance grouping and the Schema and Servers dashboards for views into the performance of your Foglight Management Server itself.  This will be a topic of an upcoming Blog entry.

Kind regards

Gowdy

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Mark Gowdy
Director, Solution Architects
Quest Software
mark.gowdy@quest.com

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