How do I increase the logging level in the Service Desk stdlog?

Products

• CA Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

How to set the debug level in CA Service desk manager to capture additional logging information ?

Environment

Release:  CA Service Desk Manager 12.9 and higher

Resolution

The main log file for Service Desk is the stdlog, which can be found in the Service Desk "log" directory.

Logging is controlled via the 'pdm_logstat' utility; a '-h' flag is available to obtain usage instructions.

This document will assume that you want to change the logging level for everything, and will therefore use the 'pdm_logstat -a' command.

By default the following types of messages are always logged:

FATAL:
Serious inconsistencies or failures. Generates a core file and terminates

EXIT:
Error that prevents program from reasonably continuing

RESTART:
Error which restarting the process will clear

SIGNIFICANT:
Rare or interesting events that are always logged

ERROR:
Important error condition

 

To log additional information, you use the 'level' parameter in the pdm_logstat command; the additional levels are:

WARNING (70) :
Questionable circumstances have arisen

INFORMATION (80):
Interesting or notable condition

MILESTONE (90) :
Flow-of-control tracking through key subroutines as an aid to debugging

TRACE (200) :
More detailed print-style debugging

VERBOSE (250) :
Extremely detailed print-style debugging

If the logging level is changes via the pdm_logstat command, everything below the level specified is logged in the stdlog.

As an example, executing the command 'pdm_logstat -a 90' will log all of the default messages plus WARNING, INFORMATION and MILESTONE level messages.

Increasing the logging level in the stdlog will create an additional overhead on the Service Desk system, as it has more work to do. The size of this overhead will depend on the logging level which is set. You may want to check the impact that increasing the logging level has on your system before setting this for any significant length of time.

Additional Information

To review what logging levels are present and how to turn off logging, please see:

How to determine Service Desk Manager (SDM ) trace levels enabled from 'pdm_logstat'
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/28096