Composite Application Logging |
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Process Platform allows you to execute, monitor, change, and continuously optimize the processes and operations that are critical for your business continuity. During this process, an Administrator must constantly monitor the health of the processes and debug the issues that hinder the process flow, which is achieved through logging.
In case of a Composite Application that may span multiple applications, logging enables you to track the process flow across these applications and becomes essential for feedback mechanism. Other than tracking the log messages generated through logging, it is important to correlate the context of these messages to debug an issue.
Composite Application Logging (CAL) is a comprehensive logging framework that enables automatic insertion and propagation of 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.
Simply put, 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 Process 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 Fault using a specific log entry in a file.
In case of composite applications, there is a need to publish, collect, store and view log messages pertaining to multiple applications. CAL addresses this by providing a centralized logging mechanism. All log messages can be pushed to a database. In addition, CAL offer the following features:
- Single configuration point for entire Cordys system. The configuration is dynamic and the service containers need not be restarted.
- Single view of log messages generated across multiple services used by the composite application.
CAL is based on Logger context that serves as a single container, where in 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.
The contexts that are propagated from one component to another are used to search and debug logs generated by all the services from a single user interface. 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.
CAL facilitates end-to-end message logging and message tracking for composite applications. CAL supports logging for most commonly used databases such as Oracle, SQLServer, and MySql.