Keep log contents when doing manual refresh

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sfortin
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Sep 03, 2015 7:07 pm

Keep log contents when doing manual refresh

Post by sfortin »

Hi there,

LogMX is great; just bought a 5 person pro license for our team. One feature request I have is when you manually refresh a log it clears the log entries and appears to grab and parse a completely new file. Over sftp with largish logs this take a while. It would be nice if retained the old items and appended the new items like it does on Auto-Refresh.

I know I could just use auto-refresh, but for our prod servers I'd prefer to just refresh manually periodically to keep traffic low.

Cheers,
Scott
admin
Site Admin
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Dec 17, 2006 10:30 pm

Re: Keep log contents when doing manual refresh

Post by admin »

Hello Scott,

Thank you for saying that LogMX is great :wink:

I understand what you mean, and you're right about the impact that AutoRefresh has on the traffic. Yet, what you may not know, is that even when AutoRefresh is turned OFF, LogMX is (by default) periodically checking if the file needs to be refreshed, just like it does wen AutoRefresh is turned on (used to make the file tab blink when the file needs to be manually refreshed). So, except for when LogMX is loading new log entries from the file, using AutoRefresh or not has the same impact on the traffic. Yet, you can reduce this impact using 2 options (menu "Tools" > "Options"):
  1. In the "Managers" tab of Options window, you can click on the button "Managers options" at the bottom to tune the delay used by LogMX to periodically check for file modification (whether AutoRefresh is ON or OFF). See text field "Other Managers (in ms)".
  2. In the "General" tab of Options window, you can disable file change detection (i.e. file modifications check when AutoRefresh is OFF) using the check box "Enable file change detection"
If implemented, your idea could save a lot of time when refreshing a file, but on the other side, it can also lead to invalid load parsing: even if LogMX compares the begin/end of the file, and its date/size to perform a faster "Refresh" by trying to load only new log entries, it is possible that only the middle of the file changed and it would not be reflected in LogMX... you may then think that AutoRefresh has the same issue, and you would not be completely wrong: the key point is that AutoRefresh checks for file modifications very often (every 2 seconds by default for SFTP), so there is a lower probability that this invalid parsing occurs with AutoRefresh, compared to a manual Refresh performed around every minute.

I understand your concern about traffic and refresh delay, but monitoring a remote SFTP file has such limitations. So i would suggest you to use AutoRefresh using a greater delay for AutoRefresh (something like 10s) if you want to keep traffic as low as possible, or you could also use sockets to receive logs (using "SocketManager"), there will be no extra impact on traffic (but I understand it could be a big change in how you are logging, if your logging framework doesn't natively support sockets).

Please let me know if you see things in different ways :wink:
Thank you for sharing your ideas!

Xavier
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