Analyzing cogserver.log

[Feanor]

We're experiencing several performance and stability issues within our Cognos enviroment (8.1 MR2). Some of these isseus are due to inefficient reports, models and an increasing userbase. We're trying to optimize the enviroment on different levels (analyzing performance, improving reports/models, increasing hardware, etc).

Because of this, we are also trying to analyse our enviroment with help of the audit reports and log files. I'm analyzing the log file with help of the logview2 tool. However it seems that I can't find any proper documentation (@cognos) that describes the lay-out and properties mentioned in the cogserver.log.

Do you guys know if there is an explanation of the cogserver.log? I would appreciate it if you guys can help me out with this.

[CognosPolzovatel]

Feanor, perhaps this may help you:
Via the logconsole.exe application, you can go to Viewers > IPF. This will open up an IPF View where you can type the following query to bring back results: select * from IPF.
This will at least break the log file into columns, to better understand some of the properties of the cogserver.log file. Hope this provides at least some assistance.

[Feanor]

@Polzovatel
Thanks for your suggestion but I was already using the IPF log viewer. So I'm really looking for an explanation of the attributes in the log file.

For instance:
a) What is a session ID; is this a ID for a session of a specific user or not?
b) An explanation of the component ID's
c) etc..

Maybe there isn't this kind of documentation but I hoped there was.

[CognosPolzovatel]

As I understand it:

HOST_ID: The IP address of the host; host port may follow. I believe this is your Cognos server IP address

PROC_ID: I'm *guessing* this is the ID of the Cognos process/service that executes, whether it be a monitor service or a report service. 28790 represents the report server process (BIBusTKServerMain).

SESSION_ID: This translates to a specific logon session. For example, If user x logged in once today and executed several operations, I believe what is logged should be the same session string. If he then logs out and logs back in, the session id is different. However, the session_id does represent the user who performed the action.

REQUEST_ID: Not sure what exactly this represents. Obviously, something to do with the request.

Note:
For a single user running multiple reports at the same time, the session id will be the same but the request id will be unique.

OPERATION: QUERY, ADD, Logon operation, etc., depending on the logging level you have set: those operations are being logged

STATUS: Whether the operation was a Success or Failure

I wasn't able to find documenation on this, either.

[CognosPolzovatel]

Oh yeah and components can be one of the following: Report Server, BI Bus, Dispatcher, Gateway, CQE, UDA, Query Framework, Query Studio, etc..

[CognosPolzovatel]

One more thing Feanor:

I have the audit DB setup and when I look at the package via Framework Manager: I was able to determine that indeed the Session_ID, although it translates to a specific user (i.e., User Smith), the ID is different per session.

TARGET_TYPE: ACCOUNT, RUNTIMESTATE, PAGEDEFINITION, SESSION, PACKAGE, REPORT, etc.

OPERATION: Goes hand-in-hand with the TARGET_TYPE. I.e., Operation can be:
QUERY with target type: Report. Or, Query Account. This means someone viewed an account or someone viewed a report.

Hope this helps.

[Feanor]

Hi Polzovatel,

You at least help me understand some of the propeties. :D

I found some documentation about the logging in a few of the Cognos guides. I still haven't found an explanation of the properties. However, looking at the documentation It's possible our current logging level isn't set to the appropriate detail level. That could explain why I'm having a hard time understanding why certain error's occur.

I'll check if this is the case. Thanks for your help!