[Enterprise Extensions only]

Formatting and merging multiple trace files

If you turn on component trace, WebSphere Application Server enterprise services stores trace data in one or more trace logs, which must be formatted before you can read their contents.

If you want to format several trace logs at the same time and merge the output into one file, you can use the combtrace utility, as described in this topic.

If you want to format a single trace log, you can use the showlog utility as described inFormatting an activity or trace log.

To use the combtrace utility to format multiple trace log files, complete the following steps

  1. Open a command-line window on the host where the trace logs are stored.
  2. On the command line, type the following command
    Combtrace outfilename

    The combtrace command calls showlog -debug to format all the yydddhhmmss.xxx trace files in the current directory, and sequentially combines the results in the specified outputfile. It ignores all file names containing a character other than a number or a period (.).

You can use the protrace utility to filter the output in the outfilename file, as described in Filtering the information in a formatted trace file.