Windchill log tool

[tgudobba]

Does anyone know of a good tool to view Windchill logs? I heard Apache Chainsaw would work, but do not see any documentation to support this.

[jessh · Accepted solution]

You do know about http://yourHostAndPort/Windchill/wtcore/jsp/jmx/logFiles.jsp, right?

That provides an HTML UI for searching/browsing all the log files from the cluster.

Also, you know about http://yourHostAndPort/Windchill/wtcore/jsp/jmx/logEvents.jsp, right?

It provides an ability to search all "persisted" log events via the database.  These are essentially the warnings and errors (captured by a custom log4j appender, AsyncJDBCAppender).  The difference is that

1. This uses database queries
2. The log event data here is more structured and complete than that in the log file in cases

This is all assuming you're on 10.0 or later, of course.  These capabilities (and all those accessible from https://yourHostAndPort/Windchill/wtcore/jsp/jmx/index.jsp) continue to improve in each release and MOR up through 11.0.

Of course, these are not the end-all-and-be-all, and, yes, you can configure socket appenders and set up chainsaw if you like -- or use Splunk or various other tools.  It's just log4j and log files (apart from the custom database appender).

[jessh]

P.S. Out-of-the-box most warnings are not captured to log files, whereas they are persisted to the database, so that's one big difference between the log files and the persisted log event data.

[mdebower]

Thanks for the info Jess.  I am not much of a IT guy, I came from the Engineering side, before falling into the Dark Side.  Is there more information about these tools in one of the guides?

Right now  I am getting an access denied message from Tomcat, so obviously I need to learn more about this...

[jessh]

I am not sure how much the guides cover these tools.

They're accessible from Site -> Utilities -> Server Status -> Monitoring Tools, but only accessible users who are either in the Site Administrators group or listed in the wt.util.jmx.AccessUtil.siteAdministrators property in wt.properties.

Some of the cross-reference links could use more explanation and fill in better search criteria in the page they land on in older releases.  The latest releases have improved in these areas -- as well as adding various features here and there.

[STEVEG]

Jess,

There is a directory missing in the path you typed.

Should be Windchill\codebase\wtcore\jsp\jmx

[jessh]

Note that in each case I typed http://yourHostAndPort/Windchill/wtcore/jsp/jmx.  That's the correct http(s) URL path.

At a file-system level, yes, "codebase" exists between Windchill and wtcore in the directory paths.

[STEVEG]

Ah.  Ok.

I typed in the URL path and it doesn't find it.  I'm probably just typing something wrong.  No big deal.

[jessh]

If you're not a site admin or listed in the property noted, then you'll be forbidden access.

If you're on a release prior to 10.0, then this stuff does not exist.

[STEVEG]

I'm on 10.1 M050 and I have the site admin credentials.  It doesn't find it.  But I'm probably not listed in that property.

Thank you.

[TomU]

If access is denied you should see something like this:

(Note that the links above actually resolve to PTC's server.  Not sure why...) 

[jessh]

That's probably because I copy/pasted the URL for pds.ptc.com (so as to avoid typos) and then changed the protocol and host name.  The rich text reply must have converted the original URL to a hyperlink and then not updated the hyperlink when I updated the text..

[jessh]

Did you change your web app name from Windchill?

At any rate, you can get there via Site -> Utilities -> Server Status -> Monitoring Tools.

[tgudobba]

Thanks Jess, we were looking for a way to read the logs easier, and this looks like it will do the trick!

[jessh]

P.S. If the Monitoring Tools pages don't help you mine the persisted health/performance/logging data well enough, you can always either:

1. Configure to enable freeFormQuery.jsp (in recent releases).  There should be docs on this (else look in the JSP and also see create_wc_perf_user.sql in db/sql).
2. Write your own JSP (or whatever) to query the database tables in question.  Do note that out-of-the-box large strings in these tables are stored in BLOBs, not CLOBs to allow compression.  While you could alter the schema for the non-modeled tables in question to use CLOBs (the code should all continue to work either way), there are utility methods one can use to handle the BLOBs -- see the existing JSPs for details.

[BenPerry]

Tim Gudobba‌‌ & Jess Holle‌,

Just to throw in my 2 cents...  I find it helpful and beneficial "tail" the log files in the terminal Window - especially when I'm doing development work on a test/dev server.  I'm not sure if you're running Windows or Unix, but we're running Unix.  The "tail" command can do that.  That way, as new information is written to the logs, it is also shown live in the terminal window.

We actually took it step further and put a custom script around the tail command.  The script tails both of our MS and our BMS simultaneously.  That way we always see the message, no matter which MS the message is written to.