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The WebSphere Application Server enterprise services' activity logs and trace logs must be formatted before you can read their contents. You can use the showlog utility to format an activity log or trace log, and pipe the formatted output to a file as described in Formatting an activity or trace log.
To read a formatted activity log, you can use you can use a text editor
It is easier to locate the cause of a problem in smaller activity logs. Therefore, consider reducing the size of the activity log before attempting to read it. For more information about, see Hints and tips: activity log.
When reading a formatted activity log, you need to identify the group of entries that are related to the problem or error that you want to resolve. A group of entries forms a bracket, as follows:
In general, when you are reading the activity log, you start with its last entry and then work backwards, reading the previous entry, then the one before that, and so on.
To find the bracket of entries for a problem that you are diagnosing, complete the following steps:
If you do not know the UOW for the problem that you want diagnose, you can examine the entries by alternative groupings, such as TimeStamp. You can look for the end of bracket by searching in the log starting with its last entry with the TimeStamp.
When the entry related to the failure has been identified, you have found the end of the bracket. Remember the unit of work (UOW) and record IDs (Rec_nnnn) for the end of bracket entry. In the next step, you look at entries within that unit of work.
Sometimes you may not have any UOW identification for the end of bracket entry. In such situations, you must look at entries that do not have a UOW identification.
Some activity log entries are reraised exceptions received from lower level calls. The fact that these reraised exceptions occur suggests that these entries are not the source of the problem. Often, you are not interested in reraised exception entries in the log. Therefore, you may want to read the first few entries before the end of bracket and then quickly skim over the ones that have reraised exception
Also, sometimes the runtime remaps the exception it receives from a lower call to another exception which is defined on its interface.
Related concepts... | |
Parent: Problem determination | |