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Issue 2, 2016 |
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How to use Command Central remote log viewer
Welcome to another Hidden Gem, where we will highlight a lesser-known but valuable feature of the webMethods suite. There are many such hidden gems that you might not have stumbled upon in training or documentation. These gems could make your life easier or your implementation even better. This edition’s Hidden Gem is about one of the core features in Software AG Command Central adopted by all major products—the Command Central remote log viewer.
Command Central overview
Command Central is a free tool that allows you to monitor and control all of your IT landscape from a central server, as shown in Figure 1. You may leverage these capabilities over distributed environments that contain many product nodes, spread over many physical or virtual machines.
Figure 1: Command Central
Every Software AG product installation contains an agent called Software AG Platform Manager (SPM) that can monitor and control all local components. Many SPMs may report and receive orders from a single Command Central.
Command Central is also backward-compatible as shown in Figure 2. You can install the latest version and connect it with older SPMs in your landscape. As the tool is currently not licensed, you simply download the SPM installer from Empower, Software AG’s customer support site, and set it up in a separate node. It installs with a single command line.
Figure 2: Command Central is backward-compatible.
Central access to all your logs
One of the monitoring highlights of Command Central is its ability to centrally access the logs of all products in your landscape. You don’t have to connect to the machine or the management console of the products to be able to examine their logs—you can do this directly from the Command Central.
Why use Command Central log management?
Getting logs without Command Central is cumbersome
To read the log of a remote Integration Server without Command Central requires multiple, time-consuming steps. For each instance, you have to perform the following steps:
- Remote desktop/SSH to machine
- Navigate to the proper instance
- Get the log and copy it back
You must repeat these steps for each and every server you have which can be potentially confusing and time consuming depending on the size of your landscape.
Simplify getting logs with Command Central
With Command Central, every log is just a few clicks away. You can view or download the logs by just navigating to the webMethods Integration Server instance in the Command Central Web UI. It does not matter if the instance is local or remote. The log review becomes a simple and scalable task.
How to use Web UI log viewer?
Accessing the logs of an Integration Server instance from the Command Central Web UI is quite simple. Select your environment, navigate to the instance you want to examine, go to the Logs tab then select the log you want to view.
Figure 3: Command Central Web UI Log Viewer
The default log view shows you the last 100 lines of a file, as shown in Figure 4. This is configurable. You can also download the whole log from the symbol on the upper right corner. You can also filter the log content with normal text search or advanced regular expressions.
Figure 4: The lines shown in the log view are configurable.
You can also download multiple logs at once. Simply select them in the log view, then click on the chain wheel. There you will find the “Download selected logs” option, as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: Download multiple logs at once.
Need more information?
Log access from the Command Central Web UI is available from SPM 9.6 and later versions. You can find detailed documentation on the log access feature in Command Central and SPM Help documentation, also available from the Tech Community.