Log Reader

Overview

Plug-in Notes:

Allows only System Administrators or members of the Designers group to access log data.
Does not load files outside the logs directory or files that do not end in .log.* or .csv.*.
On multi-application-server environments, logs will only be shown from a single application server.
Custom headers can be specified as an optional parameter. This is meant to be used for .csv files that don't contain a header.

Key Features & Functionality

The Appian Log Reader Plug-in contains functionality to:

Read files in the Appian /log folder (.csv or .log) and return them as structured data
Aggregate data from a .csv file
Serve as the source for a service-backed record for viewing logs
The Log Reader application provided with the download demonstrates a service-backed record for viewing logs, as well as reports on specific log files. Administrators can view reports on system health over time, including design best practices, system load, and database performance. The application also contains a process that checks details from system.csv and alerts administrators if memory or CPU utilization exceeds a threshold.
Tail a log file with tailcsv and taillog. Note that tail is an expensive operation which is optimized for reading the last few lines of a large log file. It's not advisable to tail the entire log file from the end to the beginning. However, tail will perform much better than the other log functions when reading the last few lines from a very large log file. Use the batch size and timestamp filters to limit the number of lines read by the tailcsv and taillog functions.
Takes a line of text in CSV format and returns a text array

Andre Dessens over 5 years ago in reply to Mike Schmitt

For Appian Cloud installations, users with the proper authorization (e.g. anyone with Designer access) can access the logs for the whole environment from all the distributed app servers through the System Logs interface (i.e. <base_url>/suite/logs). You can navigate up in the logs directory to the /shared-logs folder. You can then drill down to the different app server log folders from there.

For On-Prem installations, users should reach out to the team responsible for their Appian instance (usually the IT department) to find out how they provide access to the logs.
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Mike Schmitt over 6 years ago

The readcsvlog() function doesn't seem to do anything with the headers parameter - can we expect this to ever be fixed?
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Mike Schmitt over 6 years ago in reply to Andre Dessens

Andre Dessens - thanks.. but that leaves me slightly confused, as I'm unclear how we would be expected to put together a comprehensive set of log data for an environment with several app servers. Is there a current supported method for doing such a thing?
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Andre Dessens over 6 years ago in reply to Mike Schmitt

The Log Reader plugin doesn't support reading logs in distributed environments. You would only be able to read the logs associated with the application server environment handling your current session.
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Mike Schmitt over 6 years ago

How exactly do we read log files across all environments, i.e. under /shared-logs?
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Inderjeet Singh over 6 years ago in reply to erickp

you would have to read individual log files.
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erickp over 6 years ago

Hi, if we have two servers but we have symbolic links pointing to a shared-log, would the plugin be able to collect the data from both servers?
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erickp over 6 years ago in reply to Ankur V

Thank you. Do you by any chance have an example on how to use the function to only return data for a particular date and time range? I tried using the timeStampStart and timeStampEnd parameters but they are not working for me. Any help is appreciated.
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Ankur V over 6 years ago in reply to erickp

We are using it on 19.1
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erickp over 6 years ago

Hi, is this plugin being maintained to support latest versions of Appian?
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