One thing that can be a great frustration for administrators troubleshooting issues with WebSphere applications is combing through the standard logs that combine all application output into a single log. This intermingles logging from all of the applications running on a particular application server and can make it difficult to troubleshoot issues with specific applications. This is especially true with aggregate applications like Connections, which are comprised of many individual applications, many of which contain and log the same components.

 

Fortunately, there's a way to pull the logging for specific applications so you're only looking at relevant data. It starts by enabling the recommended HPEL logging system. Full documentation is available in Knowledge Center, but it's pretty easy to get started:

1. Log into the administration console.
2. Navigate to Troubleshooting -> Logs and trace -> <application server>.
3. Click the Switch to HPEL Mode button and save the configuration.
4. Sync your application server node.
5. Restart the application server.

There are a variety of logging options that are worth investigating, but I'll leave that as an exercise for you. The cool part happens after we restart the application server with HPEL enabled. For this example, let's suppose I'm interested in collecting logs only from Connections' Search application. With Basic logging, I'd have to identify some package names and grep them out of the log. HPEL mode works with a bundled tool named logViewer to make this very simple:

 

$ sudo profile/bin/logViewer.sh -includeExtensions appName=Search -outLog Search.log

 

And just like that, I have only the logs from the Search application. How great is that? The same technique works for any valid application name running on that server. We can even take this a step further by wrapping this in a script that will be more convenient for long-term use.

 

#!/bin/bash

appName=${1}
profileDir=/var/IBM/websphere/was/profiles/ic1
logsDir=${profileDir}/logs/ic1

if [ -z ${appName} ]; then
    echo "Usage: getAppLogs.sh <WebSphere application name>"
else
    ${profileDir}/bin/logViewer.sh -includeExtensions appName=${appName} -outLog ${logsDir}/${appName}.log
fi

 

Just update the profileDir and logsDir variables (or use a more graceful technique to set them for portability), and now you have an extremely convenient way to pull application logs whenever you want.

 

$ sudo profile/bin/getAppLogs.sh Search

 

Tags:  logs troubleshooting administration