Spotfire Ideas Portal
By default the log files created by Spotfire server and Spotfire node managers do not have a standard format. Some use a semicolon as a delimiter others use something else. I would like to suggest that the default format be XML for all log files. For example this can be achieved in a log4net logger by specifying the XML layout:
<layout type="log4net.Layout.XmlLayout">
This is will have the huge advantage of simplifying importing log files in various 3rd party tools for easy parsing, and also ensures a standard format for all log files.
As it is, the log files can grow to an enormous size making the task of diagnosing & analyzing a situation very difficult. Please implement this idea which will improve productivity for support staff and administrators.
I understand your concern, Sukesh. But based on our experience we see other patterns.
Most applications use CSV since it is the de facto industry logging format, specially for large data sets since it requires less storage space. Other modern set ups prefer to stream directly the logs to external specialized logging applications using JSON format. There are many different accepted good practices.
We at TIBCO are not going to impose a specific format since we believe on allowing customers to configure application logging to facilitate integration with their own monitoring & supervision product landscape so it fits their specific needs.
Following the "facilitate integration" principle, our logging configuration defaults are intended to be aligned with the industry standards.
Nothing is stopping me altering the config, however my suggestion was more aimed at those who need to support the product (like myself). When receiving log files from customers, they need to be analysed quickly. So having a default config of outputting XML log files makes life so much easier as the log files are then importable and queryable.
As you pointed out log4net supports this, so what's holding you back from modifying the log4net.config to suit your needs? Spotfire uses 3rd party loggers (log4net for Web Player and log4j for Server) so the only thing they can around logging to implement feature requests is to update the 3rd party libraries (which they just did for Server, 7.9 uses log4j 2) or change the default config - the latter which you can do yourself as well