Plugins and Log Levels?
We are using a modified/enhanced version of the Extended Email plugin and one thing I'm mystified by is the logging model plug-ins use. As a backdrop, we use Splunk to pick up all logs, as well as validating directly through the dynaTrace user interface.
The issue we have is that changing the log level from the Plugins admin screen appears to result in unexpected/wrong results. To be specific, if I change the log level to FINER, all INFO messages stop being logged. If I turn on INFO mode, we see INFO, WARN, and SEVERE messages. I believe that when FINER is set, FINE messages don't show up either.
We also noticed an issue that, again using this plugin as an example, that when I set the log level to FINER, it does it for the main package, but other packages (like ActionHelper) don't have their content logged when using the FINER log level. The net/net is that plug-in development and validating it in your production environment with different use cases is particularly difficult, and in the end, we use INFO as an audit-trail model (with the data getting indexed in Splunk), and losing those messages when we shift to FINER is a big deal.
Thoughts on what's going on here and how can we remediate?
I'll open a support ticket – your support org doesn't like to support plug-ins, as that's not the area of expertise, which is a tad frustrating. But glad to track this through the normal process.
We see the compression – which we actually would like to turn off, since it has the risk of losing some audit trail data we push out via log and index via Splunk – but what we don't see are any INFO logs when FINER is turned on; the only appear when we set the log level to INFO. That's via the dynaTrace console as wel as Splunk reading the same logs.
Thanks,
Jim
Hi James,
I just tested this locally with the current version of dynaTrace and for me changing log levels works as expected. Please note that:
a) the plugin logging system will compress duplicated consecutive log messages of the same level within 15 minutes to a single entry and
b) that changing the log level of a plugin in the "installed plugins" tab will be effective for all plugin schedules in all system profiles
could this be the source of the confusion? Otherwise please open a support ticket and attach a support archive, the plugin logs in question (if not contained in the archive) and your custom plugin.
hope this helps,
Michael
