Information
  • Author: Appian Corporation
  • Type: Plug-in (Function & Smart Service)
  • Support: This plug-in or utility is not supported by the author. The content is free to use with a licensed product, but it is made available as-is and Community supported.
  • Industry: All Industries
  • Compatible Version(s): 22.2+, 24.1
  • First Released:
  • Last Updated:
  • Cost: Free
Share
Home » AppMarket » Log Reader

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
Anonymous
  • in reply to Mike Schmitt

    - are there any updates as to who's in charge of maintenance on this plug-in?  Is it being actively maintained / is there any chance of any of the issues or inconsistencies i've enumerated, being addressed in the foreseeable future?

  • in reply to Mark Talbot

    Checking back in / , i can confirm that "csvToTextArray" fails to correctly parse CSV rows as returned by the original "readCsvLogPaging" function which (as i previously noted quite a while ago) incorrectly strips quote escaping from CSV text containing a comma (basically causing one cell worth of data to be treated as two cells when it contains a comma).

    As I noted somewhere, that seems to have been fixed in the "tailCsvLogPaging" function (i.e. passing a returned row from that function through "csvToTextArray" returns the expected number of fields, even when a row cell includes a comma); however there seem to still be unresolved issues even with that one - for one, the "headers" value seems to *only* return blank, and additionally, with no "start index" (as i noted a year or so ago) it leaves me unable to really execute my use case of creating a grid and allowing users to page through it (starting of course with most-recent-first).

    Any chance of some new changes to harden the behavior a bit and get them acting consistently, etc?  I have an Admin tool that queries error messages from the log but I have to bend over backwards to parse the rows carefully enough that it doesn't blow up on me, and it seems like every other week I need to install yet another heuristic to sanitize a comma appearing in a data row in a new way.  It's not really scalable.

  • in reply to jeffh0004

    this has (apparently) been addressed in a more recent reply.  In my environment though i'm unable to test or confirm one way or another.

  • in reply to Michael Chirlin

    This is not working for me. When I try to give the server it always appends the path to "/usr/local/appian/ae/logs" and try to read the file from "/usr/local/appian/ae/logs/mysite-3/authz-audit.csv". As there is no such path we are not getting expected output. Can any one please let us know if any one is successful in reading a log file using this plugin in distributed environment.

  • in reply to vishnudevalla

    It does not package log4j within it, no update is necessary.

  • in reply to nirupamaanuragt399

    On HA environments you need to specify the node name before the file name. Below is an example using Cloud node naming conventions:

    first sever:

    readcsvlogpaging(
      csvPath: "mysite/authz-audit.csv",
      startIndex: 1,
      batchSize: 10
    )

    second sever:

    readcsvlogpaging(
      csvPath: "mysite-2/authz-audit.csv",
      startIndex: 1,
      batchSize: 10
    )

    third sever:

    readcsvlogpaging(
      csvPath: "mysite-3/authz-audit.csv",
      startIndex: 1,
      batchSize: 10
    )

  • in reply to nirupamaanuragt399

    Kindly help looking into this issue and advise.

  • The plugin version 2.1.2 (function tailcsvlogpagingwithheaders ) is working fine in test environment while the same version is giving error in production. 

    Can someone please advise why the same version is behaving differently in both environments.

  • The timestamp filter doesn't seem to work on the Timestamp column of "audit\sites_usage.csv". Any advice? We're specifically using the logs reader plugin to pull data from this log.

  • The description mentions that this plugin can "Serve as the source for a service-backed record for viewing logs"; however when I attempted to configure a service-backed record type for viewing a log, I received the following error: "The Record Data Source cannot use plugins, query rules, or any of the following functions: query, queryEntity, queryProcessAnalytics, queryRecord, queryRecordType, executeStoredProcedureForQuery, executeStoredProcedureOnSave."

    Also, is there documentation on how to use the various functions included in this plugin? I couldn't find any documentation included in the download. Thanks!

© 2024 Appian. All rights reserved.
We want to hear from you! Submit a review on Gartner or G2.