Event Log in the Cireson Portal
From time to time you may come across an issue in the Cireson Portal for Service Manager and need to contact support to work through a problem to find a solution. One of the key pieces of information used by support is some log files generated by the system. Reading the CacheBuilder and WebConsole Log files are a good way to find out where the issue lies before logging a support call, and may provide you with enough information to resolve the issue yourself.
Where are the event log files located?
There are 3 different event log files: Install log, CacheBuilder log and Webconsole log
The Install log is only populated once and that occurs during the installation of the Portal. This can be found here: C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\Cireson Setup\<InstallDate>-setuplog.log
The CacheBuilder Log can be found here: C:\inetpub\CiresonPortal\bin\Logs (Note, this will be relative based on where you install the portal)
The WebConsole log can be found here: C:\inetpub\CiresonPortal\Logs (Again, this is relative based on where the portal was installed)
It is possible that these folders may be empty, this means you haven’t had an error occur and the logger hasn’t needed to create a log file.
What’s the difference between the Cachebuilder Log and the WebConsole Log?
When you install the Cireson Portal you also install a service called “Cireson Cache Builder”. This service runs on a schedule and brings in data from Service Manager so that the Cireson Portal can manipulate it for its own use.
Occasionally the CacheBuilder may find a discrepancy and might not know what to do with it, so it will print a notification to the error log. This can include things like invalid or missing AD groups, incorrect user permissions, or service connection errors.
On the other hand, the WebConsole log is created by IIS, which is where the Cireson Portal runs. This log file contains information about the website and the functions it performs. Errors like invalid License Key, Unauthorised access and Work Item Save errors may appear in this log.
Event Log files and Verbosity
By default, the CacheBuilder and WebConsole logs are set to a logging level of Error. What this means is that any issues that arise during normal operation will be logged into the event log file, while other notifications are suppressed.
If you have a log file that is 0kb in size, or don’t have a log file in the folders mentioned above, that means you are not using a higher logging level and you haven’t received an error since installation.
You can increase the verbosity of this and see into wha t is occurring in the processes. The increased verbosity may not be useful for you, but if you are providing these log files to the support team, they may require these to be set to a higher verbose to be able to understand the issue better.
There are a variety of verbose levels you can choose from, the main 2 are ERROR and DEBUG
Increasing verbosity is done with 2 separate files, one for the CacheBuilder and one for the WebConsole.
You can find the CacheBuilder config file here: “C:\inetpub\CiresonPortal\bin\Cireson.CacheBuilder.WindowsService.exe.config”
Edit this file in a text editor and find the text “<level value=”. This is where you can define the logging level for the CacheBuilder. You will need to restart the CacheBuilder service for the change to take effect.
You can find the WebConsole config file here: “C:\inetpub\CiresonPortal\Web.config”
Edit this file in a text editor and find the text “<level value=”. This is where you can define the logging level for the WebConsole log. You do not need to restart the website in IIS for this change to take effect.
In each file, you can replace the text “ERROR” for another value, such as ALL or DEBUG. This can help to work out what issues may be occurring if something isn’t working quite right and help finding out issues.
Leaving the value at ALL or DEBUG can produce a large file, in a typical environment, the CacheBuilder can produce 100mb every 2-3 days if left at DEBUG, so you may want to clean these up if you leave them on for long periods of time, or reset the logging level back to a lower level.
Helpful Links:
- Visit the Cireson Community for Cireson Support, Feature Requests, and more
- Support Portal Login
