Logging

General information

This page contains options concerning the logging process. Messages can be logged into a file (with optional day or month rotation) and/or into the Log panel.

• Log alert events - You can disable or enable logging events from the alerting subsystem. If this option is enabled, the following messages are logged:
  • Alert is run successfully.
  • Alert is run with error.
  • If alert is run with error, the error is logged too.
• Log scheduler events - You can disable or enable logging events from the scheduling subsystem. If this option is enabled, the following messages are logged:
  • Check has started as scheduled.
  • Check has stopped as scheduled.
• Log to file - Select this checkbox if you want log messages to be logged into a file on the disk. If this option is enabled, the following options of logging to a file can be configured too:
  • Base file name - The base of the log file name. The final log file name will depend on the rotation type. Suppose you will specify the value base in this field. In case the rotation is set to none, the file base.log will be created. If the rotation is set to day, baseXX.log will be created, where XX is today's day of the month. If the month rotation is set, baseYY.log will be used for logging, where YY is the number of the current month.
  • Directory - The directory where all log files will be stored.
  • Rotate - Rotation type. See the description of the Base file name option for more information.

Trace Logging

General information

You can use this page to specify parameters for logging protocol traces. Protocol traces are available for the SMTP, FTP and HTTP protocols because they are all telnet-based (text-based). Protocol traces will be written to the following files: http.log, smtp.log and ftp.log. These files will be created in the log directory you can specify on the Logging Options page.

Using

Logging protocol traces was developed as a debug feature to help you determine the cause of your check problems. That is why we recommend you the following strategy of using this feature:

• Stop all your checks and remove the existing http.log, smtp.log, ftp.log files from the log directory.
• Enable the trace logging feature in the options.
• Select and start the check you want to view protocol traces for.
• After the check finishes its work, you can go to the log directory and analyze protocol traces logged for this check to determine the problem.

Notes

Traces of all checks will be logged to one file in the log directory and, therefore, for example, if many checks of the FTP type are started, all the protocol activity of these checks will be written to the corresponding log file simultaneously.

Also, you should bear in mind that your passwords and other security information can be written to these files in plain text (if you use something like the automatic HTTP page login feature or an FTP check without anonymous authentication).