NetVault 12.3 - Administration Guide for Managed Service Providers

About NetVault Backup logs

All NetVault Backup processes generate log messages to provide information about the status of various operations and report error conditions. These messages are stored in the NetVault Database. You can view the log messages from the View Logs page.

NetVault Backup uses the Logging Daemon to manage and write the log messages to the database. The Logging Daemon runs on the NetVault Backup Server.

Log messages contain information that can be used for diagnosing and troubleshooting problems. When you report a problem, Quest Technical Support might request you to provide the log dump file. You can use the Download or Export method available on the View Logs page to generate the log dump file. For more information, see Downloading logs or Exporting logs.


	NOTE: NetVault Backup also provides diagnostic tracing capabilities to collect detailed information about error conditions. This information is used for debugging and troubleshooting purposes. Unlike logging, tracing is disabled by default. When investigating a problem, Quest Technical Support may request you to enable tracing on the server or client machines. Diagnostic information is written to trace files. Each process generates its own trace file. By default, trace files are stored in the trace-container directory under the NetVault Backup installation directory. For more information, see Diagnostic tracing.

Log messages that are older than 30 days are automatically purged from the database. You can use the configuration settings for Logging Daemon to change the maximum age for log messages. You can also manually delete the log messages by using the Purge Logs method available on the View Logs page.

Role-based access for monitoring logs

Table 74. Monitoring logs role-based access
Log actions	MSP administrator	Tenant administrator	Tenant user
View Logs	X	X	X
View Logs - Download	X
View Logs - Export	X
View Logs - Purge	X
View Logs - Set Event	X	X	X
View Logs - More Info	X	X	X
View Logs - KB Search	X	X	X

MSP administrator, Tenant administrator, and Tenant users can manage logs for their respective scope to work which are owned by the them. These users are restricted to view each others jobs activities.

Viewing log messages

You can view the log messages from the View Logs page. From this page, you can perform various log-related tasks, like download or export log messages, set log events, or purge log messages.

MSP administrator, tenant administrator, and tenant user can view job messages of the authorized client machines.

To view the log messages:

In the Navigation pane, click View Logs.

On the View Logs page, you can view the log messages generated by various processes.

Figure 25. View Logs page

The table displays the following information:

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Severity: Severity level of the message.

Log messages are classified into the following severity levels: Background messages, Information messages, Job messages, Warning messages, Error messages, and Severe error messages.

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Date: Sate and time when the log was generated.

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Job ID: Job identification number.

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Class: Type of operation that generated the logs.

Log classes include the following: System, Schedule, Jobs, Media, Database, Plugins, and UI.

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Client: Name of the client for which the log was generated.

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Message: Detailed log message or description.

The following table provides a brief description of the log severity levels.

Table 75. Log severity levels
Icon	Severity level	Description
	Background	General log messages.
	Information	Log messages related to media, scheduler, and system activities.
	Job message	Log messages related to backup, restore, and report jobs.
	Warning	Problems that might not have caused a job to fail.
	Error	Problems that might have caused a job to fail.
	Severe error	Critical problems that might have caused an operation to fail.


	NOTE: The icons for some log messages can contain an exclamation mark (for example, , , and others). This mark indicates that you can open the message to view the log context information. To view the context information, click anywhere in the Severity column. Alternatively, select the message, and click More Info. The dialog box that appears can include data transfer details, execution scripts, or other information. After reviewing the details, click OK to close the dialog box. Setting the 'Display Level' to a particular severity level shows log messages for the selected severity and higher.

By default, the table is sorted by Date (newest to oldest).

You can sort the table by one or more columns, as required. For more information, see Sorting records in NetVault Backup WebUI.

To set the filter options (For more information on table filter options for View Logs page, see Table 8), view the page size setting, column sort order, applied filters in the table, export the records, or edit table settings, click the icons at the lower- right corner of the table.

For more information, see Customizing tables in NetVault Backup WebUI.

You can use the Search option to filter the table data and quickly find entries that contain the specified string in any column values. You can also include wildcards (“?” or “*”) in the search filter string. Type the search text into the box and click the tick icon or press Enter.

You can use the Display Level option to filter the messages based on their severity level. When you specify the severity level, the messages at that level and higher are displayed on the View Logs page.

By default, Display Level is set to Job Messages. With this setting, you can view Job Messages, Warnings, Errors, and Severe errors on the page. To specify the minimum severity level for messages that are displayed, select the level in the Display Level list.

The View Logs page loads a maximum of 10,000 records initially. The total number of records fetched is displayed at the lower-right corner of the table.

You can click Load more to load the next set of records, if available. Each load action fetches a maximum of 10,000 records. This button is disabled if there are no more records to load.

To stop or resume live updates, click the Pause or Resume Live Updates button.

To perform a log-related task, click the corresponding button in the Operations pane. Alternatively, click a link in the Navigation pane to open a different page.

Downloading logs

When investigating a reported problem, Quest Technical Support might request you to provide the log dump from the NetVault Backup Server. You can generate the dump file by using the Download or Export method available on the View Logs page.

The Download method creates dump files on the local machine where the WebUI is running. This method is useful if you are accessing the server from a remote machine. The Export method creates the file on the NetVault Backup Server. For more information about this method, see Exporting logs.

The supported dump formats are text, binary, and database table dump. By default, the dump file includes all current logs. You can use the filter options to download log entries that meet the specified criteria. For instance, you can set filter options to display log entries for a specific period or a specific job ID number, and then download these entries to a dump file.

To download logs:

In the Navigation pane, click View Logs.

Click Download, and in the Confirm Download Logs dialog box, select the dump format:

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Binary Log: Select this option to export the logs to a binary file (“.nlg”).

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Text Log: Select this option to export the logs to a text file.

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Database Table Dump: Select this option to export the logs to a PostgreSQL dump (pg_dump) file.