Should I change the default Syracuse logging in my production system

2 minute read time.

You have just completed your Syracuse installation and have handed over to the users, so you can relax and move onto the next task, right?   It's not always that easy and after a few days, users suddenly start complaining about odd messages intermittently appearing whilst using X3 or that screens are taking longer to respond than normal, so what can you look at to identify these sorts of issues?    The Syracuse logs would be a good starting point, but by default only log errors (mostly) so may not show anything useful at all!

Of course, you can now adjust the logging levels and wait for the issue to recur, but wouldn’t it be useful to be able to run your production system with a certain amount of additional logging already enabled?

The big question

So, after a long pre-amble we have at last got to the meat of this article… should you change the default Syracuse logging in a production system?

The answer is generally "Yes", but let’s not go too crazy and set everything to "debug" level logging!    Below I have shared the standard changes I would go for with all systems, unless there are specific reasons not to.

Why?

The default Syracuse logging is quite minimal, which is fine when you are not interested in what is happening on the system, but perhaps you need to investigate a user reported issue or want to get a feel for the system usage and/or activity generally, then the information is not immediately available.

How?

You can access these settings in Administration, Administration, Settings, Global Settings.  

NOTE: any changes you make take effect as soon as you hit the "Save” button, so be sure you are happy before doing so.

Suggested changes you can consider

At the top of the "Logs" section, I would suggest changing Maximum file size to 200 and Maximum number of days to 15.   These settings are especially appropriate if you are tracing an issue or have an intermittent problem and want to see when it started to happen.

I generally also like to check "Enable web client logs" and set to "Error"  This setting will echo many of the errors the users sees on their PC into the server log file, so you can ascertain how many issues users really are seeing and when.  Some of the errors may be false positives, but even so will generally be useful to track any errors reported to the client.   WARNING: as at Syracuse 12.15, enabling client logging can cause odd behaviour if the user session timesout and the user had existing classic sessions loaded.  This behaviour will be resolved in a future version.

In the main matrix, most of the settings will only be changed from default settings for specific purposes, then be reverted afterwards.  The settings below I would normally change and leave in place:

Set the following entries to "Info" level logging
http.in
http.out
These settings provide details of inbound (user) requests and outbound (calls to Apache for example) along with useful data such as time taken to complete the request

memory shows useful performance data such as memory used and number of sessions per Syracuse node.

Everything else I would normally leave as default, unless specifically needed for diagnosing issues.

Conclusion

As the default Syracuse logging out of the box is minimalistic, I hope this article has allowed you to consider making changes to these default settings, to help get more generally useful information for a variety of situations.