Appendix B       Using the Agent Debug Engine


Sun ONE Identity Server Policy Agent for Application Server is equipped with a sophisticated Debug Engine that can be used to gather statistics about your deployment, oversee the execution of the Agent as it protects various applications, and troubleshoot hard to locate problems with your installation.

To use this engine, set the properties correctly for the Debug Engine configuration.

A few things worth noting are:

• When the Debug Engine is operational, that is the debug level is set to a value other than 0, the Agent reports varying set of information to the Debug Engine. The Debug Engine has to process this information in order to store or display it appropriately. This process results in a overhead that should be avoided if the performance of the system is of utmost significance. Therefore, the Debug Engine should not be used when the system is in production. It should be used during testing of the deployed application under controlled environment.

• If the Debug Engine is enabled, that is the debug level is set to a value other than 0, it is possible that Print STDOUT flag is disabled as well as the debug file is not specified correctly. In such a situation, all the debug messages are lost, yet the performance of the system suffers. Therefore, to ensure that the debug engine is disabled, set the debug level to 0.

• The Debug Engine's date and time format is configurable and can be used to generate specific strings which may help distinguish between Agent Messages from other messages being generated on the Application Server console.