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Logs and alerts

While a system or an application is in use, exceptions and warnings can occur that, when captured, help analyze the issues that the system or the application encounters. Pega Platform™ captures the errors, warnings, and other debugging information in log files.

Logs

Pega logs are segregated into different categories to help you better understand the system and maintain its health. Developers log information for debugging while developing, for example, to log a message for information purposes, see what a property value is, or to log a message to help others understand why a step failed. These log files help with the initial understanding of the functionality if you need to debug in cases where the clipboard does not log such information, or the tracer tool is not accessible. Log files also gather data about internal operations, system performance, and security, helping you to manage your application. You can also turn logging on and off.

Pega Platform provides log levels to help you understand the severity of events written to the logs. The following are the log levels, which range from high severity to lowest severity: FATAL, ERROR, ALERT, WARN, INFO, DEBUG. To understand how logging happens, when a log level is set to ALERT, the PEGA Log file includes the log messages for events with a severity of ALERT, ERROR, and FATAL. Choosing a log level is important because the setting might increase the log file size. There is also an ALL level, in which all messages are logged. Pega Platform provides an automatic reset interval for each log category, and when you no longer need a log category to be at the current level, you can reset the log level.

For more information, see Changing the log level of a single log category and Resetting the log levels of all log categories

Note: If the cluster protocol is set to Standalone, log categories do not function, and so the system does not generate log content. If the cluster protocol is set to Hazelcast, log categories function as expected and the system generates log content. 

Additionally, to generate a new log file every day, you update the prlog4j2.xml file to generate a new log file at the start of each day or on a periodic basis, rather than just at system startup. This process is called rolling the log file. For more information, see Rolling log file.  

Debugging issues related to autopopulated properties are not always easy to parse without metadata. Creating logs with metadata can help troubleshoot autopopulated properties. pxAutoPopulate is the log category for logging autopopulated properties. For more information about generating logs for autopopulated properties and related settings, refer to Generating logs for autopopulated properties on the Pega documentation website.

Alerts

Alerts in Pega Platform generate logs when there are performance or security issues. When running a rule exceeds a performance threshold, performance alerts are generated, and when the server is at risk, security alerts are generated. 

The alerts with PEGA at the start of their name are performance alerts, and alerts that start with SECU are security alerts. Some performance alerts can be related to database alerts. For example, the PEGA0001 alert is generated when the elapsed time for an HTTP interaction exceeds the threshold setting. This alert could be due to long-running calculations, waiting for database connections, or waiting for information from an external service. The PEGA0020 alert is generated when the interaction time with an external system or a database connection request exceeds the threshold value. This exception can occur when a network issue affects the existing connection, or a newly created connection.

The alerts format helps you understand the alert. For example, PEGA0011 is generated when a service operation or parse rule operation takes an unusually long time. The alert is generated when any of the measured times exceeds a corresponding threshold for the following five measures:

  • pxTotalReqTime– Total request time, alerts appear by default for times exceeding 1 second. 
  • pxServiceImpMapReqTime– time taken for request mapping. 
  • pxServiceOutMapReqTime– time taken for response mapping. 
  • pxServiceActivityTime– time taken for service activity execution. 
  • pxServiceParseRuleTime– time taken for Parse XML rule, Parse Delimited rule, and Parse Structured rule execution. 

For more information see, Alerts overview  

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