Table of Content
- Introduction
- Analyzing a full IIS log file
- Analyzing Console operations
- Viewing the results
- Conclusion
- Reference
Introduction
With the recent releases of aila2 [1] and aila2-filter [2] on Connect Downloads we have some tools to summarise the content of IIS log files, in block or tailored to match specific timings or cs-uri-stem.
However the raw output (json formatted) is rather dry and not so easy to interprete. This is why the aila2 Download contains all the html (and css and javascript) required to build up a web-ui.
Today we will review how to use the aila2 and aila2-filter with practical examples and we'll see what the Quickview result page looks like.
Analyzing a full IIS log file (aila2):
We are using an old SMP 7.0 file for this sample (from a decommissioned system) dating 2012-06-21:
C:\aila2>aila2 z:\temp\u_ex120621.log
The result set is attached to this article (u_ex120621_full.json.txt) so you can test the UI yourself.
You can see the charts from this JSON on Image 3, Image 4 and Image 5.
Analyzing Console operations (aila2-filter + aila2):
We are using the same log file as above, but this time around we will filter out a certain amount of data in order to remove the agent interfaces and keep only the Console operations.
C:\aila2>aila2-filter -s -x "/altiris/ns/agent /altiris/packages inventoryrule taskmanagement clienttaskserver" -f z:\temp\u_ex120621.log | aila2
The result set is attached to this article (u_ex120621_console.json.txt) so you can test the UI yourself.
You can see the charts from this JSON file on Image 6.
Viewing the results:
Download the aila package [1] and extract it to a folder of your choice. Navigate to the extraction folder and open the Quickviewer.html page with your favourite web-browser.
Note! If you use Internet Explorer you will have to allow the use of ActiveX component as the page loads external scripts from Google API's.
Screenshots shown below are mixed results from Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome.
Once your browser opens you will have a large text area to paste your JSON Results. Note that the text data will be parses and sanitize. So you needn't worry about line breaks added by the cmd.exe output.
Image 1: Quickview.html after loading in Internet Explorer (the image is truncated at the pink section)
Image 2: Quickview.html after pasting the JSON results
Once the data is on the text area, you can click on "Evaluate JSON and generate graphs". If the pasted data contains a stats array we will load the json and attempt to graph the results. The generated result show in a single page, but for simplicity reasons I am displaying the page in 3 sections here (one per browser):
Image 3: Quickview.html charts 1 and 2 rendered in Internet Explorer
Image 4: Quickview.html charts 3 and 4 rendered on Firefox
Image 5: Chart 5 and the 2 data tables rendered on Google Chrome
Image 6: A full page view on the Console results via Firefox
Conclusion:
aila2 and aila2-filter allow you to generate one-off result set depending on what problem areas you are troubleshooting via the IIS log files. You can also view those throw away results rapidly using the Quickview.html web page.
Reference:
[1] aila2: A c# program to analyze Altiris IIS log files
[2] aila2-filter: A tool to filter IIS log files by time-taken or uri-stem fields