Tips and Tricks Working with Scribe Trace Files

Transcription

1 Tips and Tricks Working with Scribe Trace Files This document gives some details about how Scribe tracing works, how to enable tracing, and how to read trace files. It also includes some tips and tricks you might find helpful when working with trace files. The two types of Scribe Insight trace files The first concept to understand is that there are two types of trace files. There is a main trace file and there are trace files for each message processor. Main trace file. This file captures the activity when you run a DTS file from the Scribe Workbench. It also captures the activity of the services on the Scribe Insight server, for example when monitors run their query and when integration processes are triggered to run. This is the trace file that you name in the Scribe Workbench where you enable tracing. Figure 1 Naming the trace file Message processor trace files. Each message processor operates independently of the other message processors and for that reason they need their own trace file. If all message processors wrote to the 2009 Scribe Software Corporation Revision A / 5-Feb-09 1

2 same trace file, you would not be able to make sense of the trace file and understand which actions in the trace came from what message processor. MessageProcessor00 is always the message processor that handles file, time, and query integration processes. Message processors 01-nn handle queue integration processes. For example, the Scribe Insight server can run multiple message processors at the same time when using a message queue. Each message processor has a number assigned to it and the numbers for queue message processors start at 01 and count up. When a message processor is processing a message by running a DTS file, the actions it takes are written to the message processor s trace file, Trace_Proc_02.txt for example. The file names of the trace files start with the main trace file name and finish with the processor number appended to it. For example, if the name you set for the trace file is Trace.txt, the name of the message processor traces files will be Trace_Proc_00.txt, Trace_Proc_01.txt, Trace_Proc_02.txt, and so on. How to enable tracing Figure 2 Example of trace file names Tracing is enabled in the Scribe Workbench or in the Scribe Console. In the Scribe Workbench, you can set the name for the trace file. The Scribe services check to see if they should trace only when the services start up. So if the services are running and the tracing status is changed, the services need to be restarted to recognize that tracing was turned on or turned off. To enable tracing in the Scribe Workbench 1. On the View menu, click Options. Tips and Tricks Working with Scribe Trace Files 2

3 2. In the Application Options dialog box, click the Tracing tab. 3. Check the Tracing Enabled box. 4. Browse to an existing file (.txt), or browse to a folder and type a name to create a new file. 5. If you are using an existing file, you can click Clear Trace File Contents to clear the contents of the trace file. If you do not clear the file, the new trace information is appended to the existing trace file. 6. Click OK to close the Application Options dialog box and start tracing. 7. The Tracing icon ( ) is added in the lower right corner of the status bar of the Scribe Workbench to show that tracing is enabled. To enable tracing in the Scribe Console 1. In the Scribe Console, expand the Administration node. 2. Click Site Settings. 3. Click the Tracing tab. 4. Click Enable Tracing. The button name changes to Disable Tracing. 5. You can click Clear Trace File Contents to clear the contents of the trace files. If you do not clear the contents, the new trace information is appended to the existing trace files. 6. Restart the Scribe services. Key words and phrases in trace files The following is a list of words and phrases that you will commonly see in a Scribe trace file. These can be used as identifiers to help pinpoint an error in a trace file and to understand what the software was doing at point in time. Resuming trace for ScribeInternal_MS Signals the start of a new trace session. If tracing is turned off and on several times with the same trace file in place, you will see this key phrase in the trace file where the new trace session started. Tips and Tricks Working with Scribe Trace Files 3

4 ERROR! Most errors have this key word before them. Some of the errors captured in the face are trivial and can be ignored. INSERT INTO SCRIBE.EXECUTIONLOG Shows the action where the start time is written to the execution log. This happens after the source and target connections have been made, the schemas have been validated, and before the data actually begins to get processed. If this statement does not get written to the trace it is probably because there was a problem connecting to the source or target, or that there was a problem validating the schemas saved in the DTS when compared to the schemas in the live connection. UPDATE SCRIBE.EXECUTIONLOG SET "ENDTIME" Shows the action where the end time of the DTS is written to the execution log. After the DTS file has finished running that statistics about that run are written to the execution log. If you are working with a trace file that has multiple DTS files in it, you can use the INSERT INTO SCRIBE.EXECUTIONLOG and UPDATE SCRIBE.EXECUTIONLOG SET "ENDTIME" statements to know where tracing for that run of that DTS begins and ends. Executing step - n (source row n) Tells you what step is being attempted for what source row. You can substitute the step number and the row number for your situation. This can be helpful when trying to find out exactly what action was attempted preceding the error. For example, if the Transaction Errors Report shows you there was an error processing row 5, step 2, you could search in the trace file for Executing step 1 (source row 3). LOOKUP This keyword tells you that either a lookup link or lookup function, such as DBLOOKUP, was used. Just after this keyword, you will see the value used in the lookup. User error Captures the action of the error message configured in step control by the DTS designer. Tips and Tricks Working with Scribe Trace Files 4

5 Time stamp The trace file has time stamps in the MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS format, for example, 02/04/ :52:25. You can use the timestamp for searching and for correlating events that are captured in the trace with other system events. Tips Tracing impacts performance and trace files can get large quickly. Tracing should not be left on indefinitely. If you can t predictably reproduce the error, you might need to leave tracing on for a few days until you can catch the error happening. Consider archiving the trace files once a day or several times a day, then clearing the trace files to recover the disk space. When you are working with message queues, remember that there are multiple trace files. Be sure to review all of them. When configuring step control, anticipate the errors that could happen and enter a descriptive error message for each possible error condition. If these errors happen, they will show up in the transaction error log and in the trace file. Reading the trace can help you understand what order the software does things. For example, when a DTS is opened and before it moves any data, it connects to source and target, and validates the schema information against the steps and links. Understanding the order in which the software does things can be a big help when trying to diagnose a problem. If a DTS file hangs while running, go to the end of the trace file to look for clues. See the last action written to the trace file. Sometimes what caused the DTS file to hang will not be in the trace, but you can figure out what that was by seeing the last successful action and extrapolating what would normally happen next. One trick is to take one section of the trace that shows an error and compare it to another section where the trace shows the job working without the error. Compare the two sections of trace file side-by-side and find what s different about them. If you think you can make the problem happen again, you might try clearing the trace files to start new ones. That way you cut down on the file sizes and avoid having to scan through extraneous information. Tips and Tricks Working with Scribe Trace Files 5

6 You may also want to view the Windows Event Viewer to go along with the trace files. Look for events that happened around the same time as the error shown in the trace. Sometimes you can find a correlation between something in Event Viewer and the trace. It can be helpful to have a document open for note taking or pasting sections copied from the trace file. If you are working with a large trace file and you want another person to look at it, sometimes it s helpful to give them just the section of the trace that shows the error, rather than giving them the whole trace file. If you have a large trace file and you know about what time the error occurred, you can search by a time and date stamp to a point in the trace file where the error occurred. Then you can search up or down from that time stamp to find the error. The elapsed time info can be helpful if investigating slow performance, timeouts, or hanging Be careful using Notepad to open large trace files because it might hang. Use a more robust editor that can handle large files. If the trace file is too large to open with a text editor, get a file splitter to break it into manageable sized files. Other types of tracing Feedback If you need more information than you can get from the Scribe trace files, there are other types of tracing that can be helpful when troubleshooting a problem. Adapter tracing. Some Scribe adapters have additional levels of tracing that can be optionally enabled. The Adapter for Dynamics CRM has XML logging that you enable in the Adapter Settings dialog box. SQL Server tracing. You can use SQL Server tracing to get information about what is going on at the database level with SQL Server. Note that SQL Server tracing can be verbose, and can be configured with filters. ODBC tracing. Tracing is available for some ODBC drivers. Availability of ODBC tracing is determined by the company that makes the driver. Scribe is very interested in hearing about your experiences with our products and documentation. We welcome your suggestions for improvement and encourage you to use the Scribe OpenMind community at to provide Tips and Tricks Working with Scribe Trace Files 6

7 feedback. OpenMind also lets you see information on upcoming product releases and engage in online discussions with Scribe product management and other Scribe users. Send us an at to request a logon. - end - Tips and Tricks Working with Scribe Trace Files 7