Update action logs and system monitoring
When you update your Spotfire Server to a newer version, remember to consider how an update affects the connection to your database, your database scripts, and the user action logging.
If you have been running user action logging in a previous release of Spotfire Server, then logging continues to work, but you might not be able make full use of the new functionality.
The newer functionality includes further measurements for some log points and properties (for example, CPU usage). Depending on which categories you enabled earlier, you should review the list of services. If you configure user action logs with the configuration tool, selecting categories is easy: you can review and select categories using the check boxes. If you previously selected all, the new categories are also selected.
- No changes are necessary if you are logging to a file.
- If you are logging to database, review the rest of this topic.
All enabled categories for user actions and system monitoring are logged to one single table named ACTIONLOG. With no alterations, logging should continue to work, and you should not lose measurements. We have some utilities to help you to analyze the data.
When you update the server, no corresponding automatic SQL update occurs that is related to logging. This design gives full control to you and your database administrator. For example, if you have chosen to implement an advanced management feature, such as partitioning the ACTIONLOG table, this feature remains unchanged.
The database scripts perform the following tasks.
- Create user, schema and database. After an update, you can continue to log to the same target, so do not need to recreate these.
- Create the ACTIONLOG table. This table is still used, and the structure is not altered.
- Create index tables to help searches performed on the ACTIONLOG table. If you configured your earlier installation to omit index tables, then you do not need to change this configuration. With pruning enabled, the ACTIONLOG table has rows both added and deleted, so index tables benefit from being rebuilt regularly. Discuss this task schedule with your database administrator.
- Create views for categories and actions with informative column names, and with the same information as that described in
Action log data collected. The views are needed only if you use them for analysis. During an update, these are the only names that must be updated in the database. You can find the information for creating the views in the database installation scripts. These scripts are in the installation kit as follows.
- ./scripts/oracle_install/actionlog
- ./scripts/mssql_install/actionlog
See the following topics for updating the databases.