Overview
Sapphire Trend employs a mechanism for logging the operations of both the Sapphire Collector and the stManager. All audit messages are written to log files which are stored in the logs directory under the installation path.
Note: In normal operation, the user will not need to examine these files. However, in the event that problems occur the files provide an invaluable mechanism for understanding the context within which the error occurred.
Audit Flags and Levels
To assist with debugging Sapphire Trend allows configurable Audit levels and flags. As the Audit Level is increased so the application will log more and more verbose messages detailing its processing.
Audit flags are used to generate details about specific functional areas within the application. For example, if problems occur reading OPC data items into the Sapphire Collector then the O flag should be set. This will provide a detailed analysis of the OPC operations whilst keeping auditing in all other areas of the application to a minimum.
Tip: In normal operation the Audit level should be set to a low level to minimise performance issues.
Audit Files
Generating large audit files consumes disk space. If left un-managed, this can eventually fill all the available disk space. To avoid this problem Sapphire Trend log files are managed by specifying a maximum audit file size and defining version limits.
The maximum file size governs how big an individual log file can become. When a file reaches the specified size it is closed and a new file opened.
The Version limit specifies the maximum number of audit files to keep. When the limit is reached the oldest file will be deleted to make way for a new file.
Tip: When attempting to debug problems it is often useful to temporarily increase either the maximum file size or the version limit since files will be being opened at a high frequency when a high audit level is employed or when a number of audit flags have been set.