Setting a trace

Adjust the trace settings to help your administrator or IBM® Support to diagnose the cause of problems with the Application Performance Dashboard. Several levels of tracing are available while you work with the navigator and the Status Overview tab. You can start a detailed level of tracing exactly at the point in the user interface where you are having a problem, then return tracing to a reduced level after capturing the necessary log data. For example, if a particular dashboard is behaving unexpectedly, you can raise the trace level before opening the dashboard to log the activity and then return trace logging to the normal level.

About this task

Take the following steps to set the trace level when you want to increase or reduce the amount of trace logging.

Procedure

If the Application Performance Dashboard is not open, select it from the Performance option in the navigation bar.
Select All My Applications or an application from the navigator or Status Overview tab.
Click Actions > Trace level and select one of the following levels:
- Verbose to have all activity logged. Verbose trace level includes Moderate, Light, and Minimal trace logging.
- Moderate to have variable changes logged, such as what parameters were passed in and what calculations were made. Moderate trace level includes Light and Minimal trace logging.
- Light to log error and variable activity. You might want to set the trace to this level if you have a problem such as no data being returned but the dashboard continues to function. Light trace level includes Minimal trace logging.
- Minimal is the default setting and records only unrecoverable errors. You can set the trace level back to minimal after collecting a specific activity sequence. Even if a different trace level was set before logout, the trace is always reset to the lowest level the next time you log in.
If you want to send performance records to a common logging file, select Enable Log Performance Statistics.
The performance information from the console is written to the server where it can be combined with performance statistics from the server to provide end to end transaction response time. The required performance information includes the time that a function was started and the time that it ended.

Results

The trace is adjusted to the level chosen. The next time you log in, the trace is to Minimal until you change it again.

To keep communications traffic to a minimum, the log messages are transferred in batches. A final transfer is made after you log out, whether manually or after a timeout period. (If the browser fails, no final logging is sent.) The log is saved on the server computer and named itp.log. A new itp.log is created each time the server is restarted.

If you set Enable Log Performance Statistics, records similar to those in the following example are saved to install_dir/usr/servers/apmui/logs/itp.log:

<record>
    <date>2013-10-02T10:52:46</date>
    <millis>1380736366788</millis>
    <sequence>28008</sequence>
    <level>INFO</level>
    <class>StatusItemList</class>
    <method>tracing</method>
    <thread>96</thread>
    <message>BeginTrace:onSelectApp:272wt877d05</message>
</record>
<record>
    <date>2013-10-02T10:52:46</date>
    <millis>1380736366809</millis>
    <sequence>28009</sequence>
    <level>INFO</level>
    <class>StatusItemList</class>
    <method>tracing</method>
    <thread>96</thread>
    <message>EndTrace:onSelectApp:272wt877d05</message>
</record>