Reporting logging and statistics data to IBM Cloud Log Analysis: Overview
IBM® Integration Bus provides a facility to send logging data, resource statistics, and message flow statistics and accounting data for your integration servers to IBM Cloud Log Analysis, and then display the reported information in a Kibana dashboard.
The log reporting capability enables you to centralize the data for all your IBM Integration Bus installations, and gain an insight into the operation of your systems through a single focal point for viewing failure alerts. You can choose to report the information for a specified integration server or for all integration servers on a specified integration node.
To enable your IBM Integration Bus integration servers to report to the Log Analysis service, you use the mqsichangebluemixreporting command. When the log reporting feature is active, logging data (in the form of BIP messages) is sent to the service. You can also choose to report the following information to the Log Analysis service, in addition to the BIP messages:
- Message flow statistics and accounting data
- Resource statistics
- Activity Log data
You can then use a Kibana dashboard in IBM Bluemix® to display the reported information for all your integration servers across all your integration nodes. A sample Kibana dashboard is provided, which you can load through the mqsichangebluemixreporting command, or you can choose to import it manually.
You can use a Kibana dashboard to view the logging and statistics data for all your active, configured integration servers. The IBM Integration Bus dashboard provides a set of charts that enable you to quickly identify the top five integration servers producing logging events, and the top five logging event types. It also provides charts showing total log events, highlighting the logging information, warning, and error type, and the stop, start, and change activity of the integration servers. Additionally, a tabular view of the details of all log events in the selected time period is provided.
If you configure the reporting of message flow statistics and accounting data to Log Analysis, by running the mqsichangeflowstats command, the statistics and accounting data for your configured integration servers is also displayed in the dashboard. If you configure the reporting of resource statistics (by running the mqsichangeresourcestats command), and Activity Log data (by using an ActivityLog configurable service), that data can also be displayed in the Kibana dashboard. Refer to the online Kibana documentation for more information about using Kibana dashboards, and see the IBM Integration Bus Dashboard for an example of how to create your own customized dashboard.
The Log Analysis service can also receive logging events from other products such as IBM MQ, WebSphere® Liberty, and IBM Business Process Manager, enabling you to build single queries that include events from multiple products.
For information about how to configure your integration servers to report logging and statistics data to Log Analysis, see Reporting logging and statistics data to IBM Cloud Log Analysis and displaying it in a Kibana dashboard.
Logging data:
When you activate the IBM Integration Bus logging capability (by specifying the -l parameter in the mqsichangebluemixreporting command) BIP messages that are triggered by integration server events are sent to the Log Analysis service. The logging data that is sent to the Log Analysis service contains information about the events that are issued by the integration server process; events that are initiated by other components are not reported. If you compare the contents of the local event log with the contents of the log in the Kibana dashboard, you will see that a very small number of messages at the beginning and end of the local log are not shown in the dashboard; these are typically messages about the start and end of the message logging process. For more information about the content of the logging data that is sent to Log Analysis, see mqsichangebluemixreporting command.
Statistics and accounting data:
To enable the reporting of statistics and accounting data to IBM Cloud Log Analysis, you must first enable your IBM Integration Bus integration servers to send logging information to the service, and then configure the collection and reporting of the statistics and accounting data by using the mqsichangeflowstats command. For more information, see Starting collection of message flow statistics and accounting data.
Resource statistics:
To enable the reporting of resource statistics IBM Cloud Log Analysis, you must first enable your IBM Integration Bus integration servers to send logging information to the service, and then configure the collection and reporting of resource statistics by using the mqsichangeresourcestats and mqsichangeproperties commands. For more information, see Managing resource statistics collection.
Activity Log data:
To enable the reporting of Activity Log data to IBM Cloud Log Analysis, you must first enable your IBM Integration Bus integration servers to send logging information to the service, and then configure an ActivityLog configurable service to send the Activity Log data to Log Analysis. For more information, see Reporting Activity Log data to IBM Cloud Log Analysis.