OpenText Process Suite Glossary - Composite Application Logging

Composite Application Logging (CAL)

Composite Application Logging is a comprehensive logging framework based on the Log4J Java based logging utility. Applying this framework enables the administrator to define the level of logging as well to which type of consumer the log messages will be pushed to.

For example, this can be a database, a file at the OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform file system, OS based logging, e.g. MS-Windows Event Log, etc. CAL supports most commonly used databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL.

CAL enables automatic insertion and propagation of messages and their contexts across the application processing life cycle. The context can be related to user, application, environment, call stack and so on. Few sample contexts are Used ID, URL of application, Web service name, and Computer name. This context helps to build the causality relation and enables the drill-down analysis of log messages. CAL enables logging service at the inception, processing, completion or at any stage of a business process life cycle and trace the end-to-end flow of the request.

Most of the OTPS platform based applications use multiple service containers to operate and generate component specific logs. These logs are stored at different places, which make it difficult to debug a problem. In addition, a composite web service cannot trace the error or a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) fault using a specific log entry in a file.  With composite applications, there is a need to publish, collect, store and view log messages pertaining to multiple and composite application level. CAL addresses this by providing a centralized logging mechanism.

CAL offers the following features:

•          Single configuration point for the entire OTPS platform instance, these settings are stored in the file “Log4jConfiguration.xml” in the config folder of the OTPS platform instance. The settings stored in this file defines the default System Policy based logging. This configuration is dynamic, changes made are immediately active when saving the updated file and the service containers need not be restarted.
•          In addition, you can define the settings for logging at the single service container level, called LDAP based logging, as these logging settings are stored with the service container in the LDAP registry.
•          Single view of log messages generated across multiple services used by the composite application logging framework.
•          CAL is based on Logger context that serves as a single container, while each application adds its own component specific information to this container, as the control passes from one component to another. It further allows you to configure and induce application specific information and messages that are bound to a single ID. CAL assigns a unique ID to every 'instance' of execution in the request-flow. There by, it offers a way to view the log messages that are categorized based on 'instance' of execution. This unique identification helps you to identify the application associated with each ID and to easily detect and isolate issues at platform or application level.

With the Administrator role, you have access to the Log Viewer  artifact included the My Applications App Palette. Using this interface, you can query and filter log messages. This helps you view all the log messages and extract them based on search criteria. The logging information is stored in the Logs folder, this is a sub folder of the OTPS baseline installation folder. Refer to the topic File System for more details folders and files available at the file system of the OTPS platform server.

Included in the CAL framework, you will find the Alert system that is designed to monitor the health of the running OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform instance. The Alert system informs an operator or administrator of a system error or other undesirable situations such as exceptions, errors, overload on a part of the system, and so on. With such a mechanism in place, the operators can pro-actively respond to deviations in performance and optimize the system usage, thereby preventing the error condition to spread to the other parts of the system. The Alert system provides the functionality to define an alert on a managed component and issue it when the need arises. The Alert system and generates alerts of the level: ERROR, WARNING, or INFORMATION, depending on the severity of the alert. All the alerts use the Log4J category: “com.eibus.management.AlertSystem”.

The OpenText Process Suite ABC Glossary contains a description of the important keywords and concepts of the OpenText Process Suite (OTPS) platform. It is not meant to be a complete list but can help you to master and comprehend the most important concepts and technologies of the OTPS platform. You can also find a list of abbreviations below that are used with the descriptions of the listed keywords. 

List of abbreviations 

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