Logging Data for Commerce Reporting

Data logging takes place in two environments in an Oracle ATG Web Commerce context. Some data comes from your production environment, including site visits, orders, customer/visitor changes and segment definition changes. Other data comes from the merchandising environment, including changes to categories, products, SKUs and promotions.

Data logging components for users, segments, and site visits are located in /atg/reporting/datacollection/userprofiling. The logging components for orders and the product catalog are located in /atg/reporting/datacollection/commerce. All loggers have the following common characteristics:

  1. A listener monitors for one or more event types that signify log-worthy activity in the listener’s domain. The event is placed on a queue, which notifies its associated logging component of the event. The type of event that triggers logging differs among the various types of logged data.

  2. Depending on the log type, filtering may be performed to ensure that only changes of interest for reporting are logged.

  3. The data logger writes information about the events to a tab-delimited text file. Each log file has a unique name in the format log-type_timestamp_unique-ID.data. For example:

    catalog_12-04-2006_03-27-31-442_200055200055.data

    The unique ID is generated by the /atg/dynamo/service/IdGenerator component. Including the ID in the filename means that even if you configure your system to send all log files generated by any number of Dynamo instances to a central location, there is no risk that they will overwrite one another.

    All log files consist of one tab-delimited line per entry.

    Log files are rotated by the FileLogger components, either at a scheduled time or when a configured limit on the number of log entries is reached. During rotation, the currently open log file is closed and a new one opened. The logging component fires a JMS message, which is received by the LogRotationSink, which adds the closed log file and its type to the queue in the DataWarehouseLoaderRepository.

    Note: Rotation occurs only if the current log file contains data.

The sections that follow provide specific information on each logger. Since all loggers are configured in similar ways, for logger configuration, see the Data Logging Configuration section.