Setup the file connector log on a collector

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

WARNING: Collector debugging should be only enabled temporarily for debugging purposes. Enabling the file collector can rapidly create a huge file and you can run out of space on the disk quickly.

Environment

Watch4net | M&R 7.x

Resolution

Steps

• To activate, add the following connector entry to the connector section of the /opt/APG/Collecting/Collector-Manager/<INSTANCE>/conf/collecting.xml file:

<connector enabled="true" name="File" type="File-Connector" config="conf/file-connector.xml" />

• Once the file connector is enabled, insert the word  File  in the collecting part of the collector.xml file.
  One such example is shown below. This will push the data collected by the VPLEX-Collector-Topo configuration file to the file-connector logs. 

<collectors>
  <collector enabled="true" name="VPLEX-Collector-Topo" next="File VPLEX-GroupFilterClusterIds" config="Text-Collector/emc-vplex/conf/textoutputcollector-vplex.xml" />
  <collector enabled="true" name="VPLEX-Collector-Monitorscreation" next="VPLEX-GroupFilterClusterIds" config="Text-Collector/emc-vplex/conf/textoutputcollector-vplex-monitorscreation.xml" /> 
 

      Note that the order of the items in "next=" is important; when there are multiple items in "next=" the data will flow trough the first item in "next=" and resolve all of the following "next=" before it loops back to the second item. 
      In other words if "File" is used as the second item in "next=" the data will flow trough all the filters before being written to the file-connector output.
      If the raw values being collected are desired, "File" must be used as the first item.

      By default the log file is sent to /opt/APG/Collecting/<INSTANCE>/logs/file-connector.log.
      Note that the file connector log file is also collected by the /opt/APG/bin/diagnostic.sh script.
      To verify the log file destination check the /opt/APG/Collecting/<INSTANCE>/conf/file-connector.xml file:
 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<config
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.watch4net.com/APG/Connector/FileConnector file-connector.xsd"
xmlns="http://www.watch4net.com/APG/Connector/FileConnector">

<output>logs/file-connector.log</output>

</config>

• Once the XML files have been edited, restart the Collecting service for your changes to take effect.

• The duration of the file connector is determined by the poling cycle. Once the required data is achieved, stop the collector and disable to the file connector by editing collecting.xml and changing it from true to false.

    <connector enabled="false" name="File" type="File-Connector" config="conf/file-connector.xml" />

Additional Information

If the file-connector.log is not generated. Do the following:
1. Open the file-connector.xml file in the configuration files of the collector
2. Change the <output> tag from .txt to the following:
         <output>logs/file-connector.log</output>

Reason why is .txt or .csv is not visible in the UI, and that needs to be changed to generate the log in the UI.