Tools for Managing Logging

You can customize the policies for creating and managing Messaging Server log files by using Console and the configutil command.

For Message Store logs, you can use Console to specify log settings and to view logs. The settings you specify affect which and how many events are logged. You can use those settings and other characteristics to refine searches for logged events when you are analyzing log files.

Because the MTA uses a separate logging facility, you cannot use Console to configure MTA logging services and view logs. Instead, you configure MTA logging by specifying information in configuration files.

For log analyses and report generation beyond the capabilities of Messaging Server, you need to use other tools. You can manipulate log files on your own with text editors or standard system tools.

With a scriptable text editor supporting regular-expression parsing, you can potentially search for and extract log entries based on any of the criteria discussed in this chapter, and possibly sort the results or even generate sums or other statistics.

In UNIX environments you might also be able to modify and use existing report-generation tools that were developed to manipulate UNIX syslog files. If you wish to use a public-domain syslog manipulation tool, remember that you might need to modify it to account for the different date/time format and for the two extra components (facility and logLevel) that appear in Messaging Server log entries but not in syslog entries.