aila2-web: Introducing the Calendar View and siteconfig json file

Table of Content:

• Introduction
• Creating the aila2 web-site
• Creating a siteconfig.json file
• Loading the Calendar view
• Accessing detailed log file charts
• Conclusion
• Reference

Introduction:

A number of aila2 tools are available here on Symantec Connect [1][2][3][4]. In this article we will review some features provide in the aila2 Download and describe how to build up the aila2-web Calendar View.

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Creating the aila2 web-site:

There are many options to build up an IIS web-site but today we will go with the simplest: create a subfolder under the web-root that is available to anyone with access to the server.

Assuming your server is configured with the default setting, we'll start by creating an folder named aila2 that will be available under http://localhost/aila2:

mkdir c:\inetpub\wwwroot\aila2

Next we will copy the aila2 package files to the aila2 folder:

• index.html
• aila2.js
• aila2.html
• style.css
• quickview.html

Quickview.html usage is already documented on Symantec Connect [3] and won't be reviewed here. Before we can navigate to the page and view anything we need to create a web.config file. This config file will instruct IIS to use index.html as a default page (so you can navigate to the aila2 folder without having to add the page name) and send files with a JSON mime-type as 'application/json'.

Here is the web.config file content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <defaultDocument>
            <files>
                <add value="index.html" />
            </files>
        </defaultDocument>
        <staticContent>
            <mimeMap fileExtension=".json" mimeType="application/json" />
        </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

With this done, you can now navigate to http://localhost/aila2/ to admire a blank, empty page. But don't worry, this is normal.

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Creating a siteconfig.json file:

The page is showing no results now because index.html tries to load (on your browser) a file named siteconfig.json from the current directory (aila2). However the file does not exist in this location yet.

The JSON file defines an object that contains 4 properties:

• sitename: a string value (currently unused)
• schema_version: an integer value matching the aila2 schema version (1 for aila2 version1)
• max_graphs: an integer value that defines the max number of charts to be displayed on the Calendar view
• file_list: a string array listing available json results files in the current directory

Here's is a sample json file with 2 sample log results listed:

{
	"sitename" : "aila2-web",
	"schema_version" : 1,
	"max_graphs" : 60,
	"file_list" : [
		"u_ex121121.json",
		"u_ex121122.json"
		]
}

You can now create a siteconfig.json file to show some of your existing json results file by adding the file names into the file_list array.

Please note that there is an upcoming Download package for Symantec connect that will address the automatic creation of the siteconfig file content [5].

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Loading the Calendar view:

With the siteconfig.json now available you can refresh the browser and it will display the calendar view, as visible here:

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Accessing detailed log file charts:

The calendar view expects the json files to be named using the IIS standard file names (exYYMMdd for Server 2003 or u_exYYMMdd for Server 2008/2012) and will add a link to the page to redirect the user to aila2.html

The aila2 page currently shows the same data as the quickview results:

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Conclusion:

You can now parse a complete directory of IIS log file to generate summaries and show the results in a visually appealing manner, with a calendar view and individual pages per IIS log results. The only missing element in the tool kit is the aila2-siteconfig.exe, to come soon on Symantec Connect. in order to fully automate the maintenance of the aila2-web content.

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Reference:

[1] aila2-filter: A tool to filter IIS log files by time-taken or uri-stem fields
[2] aila2: A c# program to analyze Altiris IIS log files
[3] aila2-web: How to use Quickview.html to draw charts from IIS log files
[4] aila2-runner: A simple tool to analyze all log files in a folder
[5] aila2-siteconfig: A tool to generate a site configuration file

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