XLF: Legacy Log Problems

[Steven Champeon]

On Thu, 9 Jul 1998, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> At 18:55 08/07/98 -0700, Don Park wrote:
> [...]
> >
> >Non-integrated views.  When a server generates multiple log types (i.e.
> >access, error, etc.), each log types are written out into separate files.
> >This makes it difficult to analyze problems whose symtoms are spread out
> >over multiple files.  When there are more than one process involved (i.e.
> >web server, application server, and database server), the task becomes
> >practically impossible.  It would be nice to 'merge' log information from
> >multiple sources to get a view of the all the components working together.

I think this is a great idea. Say goodbye to the days of running 'tail -f' 
in two different xterms :)
 
> It could be useful to indicate the variety of log file types. I assume that
> HTPP logs will be the favorite. [Example: I spend my time grepping the VSMS
> server logs to see what percentage of JUMBO2 downloads break - by using the
> byte count. ] Are you anticipating the elementTypes will be as detailed as
> <ByteCount> or more general like <Transaction>? [I assume the latter, with
> additional means of qualification through attributes.]

Apache uses a sprintf-like format specification language, where the log
format may be arbitrarily specified. The server is then responsible for
parsing the format string and spitting out the appropriate logstuff. I
think that the stuff one finds in logfiles is common across many different
types of logfiles, so I would prefer specific over generic element names.
Besides, these things can take up a lot of space. Do we really want to do

 <DATE TIMEZONE="GMT" MONTH="07" DAY="09" YEAR="1998" DAY="Thu" HOUR=...>

When we could (and probably should) do:

 <DATE>Thu Jul  9 12:13:13 EDT 1998</DATE>

or its equivalent? I can see the desire to genericize logfile entries
getting ugly quick :)

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