Overview
To effectively manage the CentraSite registry or repository, it is necessary to get feedback about the activity and performance of CentraSite. CentraSite provides comprehensive and flexible logging functionality for tracking design/change-time and run-time events. CentraSite stores the log and monitoring data of all registry objects (for example, policies, assets) as log records in the CentraSite Registry Repository (CRR).
As your log records increases, you may want to purge log records to avoid performance degradation. CentraSite provides the ability to purge log records and back them up to another location. You can purge log records manually (on demand) or automatically on a scheduled basis.
Logging Data
CentraSite's Logging functionality provides the ability to gather and analyze the following information:
Run-time performance data posted by a gateway (that is, a policy enforcement point (PEP) or a run-time monitoring component such as Insight).
Run-time event data (transaction events, policy violation events, and so on) posted by a gateway.
Approval history data.
Design/change-time policy data.
Audit data.
Consumer Registration data.
CentraSite includes the following system logs:
Policy Log: The Policy Log contains information about the design/change-time policies that
CentraSite has executed. By default,
CentraSite only logs information about policies that fail. However, you can optionally configure
CentraSite to log information about policies that resulted in success, informational, warning, and failure alerts.
In addition, if you purge the policy log, CentraSite makes an entry in the policy log to indicate that entries have been purged.
Approval History Log: The Approval History Log contains a record of all approval requests that have been triggered by a policy with an approval workflow action. This log shows the status of each approval request that has been submitted to
CentraSite.
Audit Log: An Audit Log reports on the creation and update activities of a particular asset (including changes in an asset's lifecycle state).
Run-Time Event Log: The Run-Time Event Log contains information about run-time events that have occurred in a gateway (that is, a policy-enforcement point (PEP) or a run-time monitoring component).
Run-Time Performance Log: The Run-Time Performance Log captures run-time metrics for all assets and publishes them to
CentraSite at regular intervals.
Purging Data
The term obsolete refers to any data not needed by the database but still occupying space on it. This unwanted or obsolete data can eventually fill up the disk and decrease the database performance, causing time-consuming database lookups, contention issues and so on. The process of systematically removing this unwanted data from the database is called purging. This process basically involves running the Purger scripts. They are available for all log units stored in the CentraSite Registry Repository.
Typically, you need the CentraSite Registry Repository to include only the recent log records. For instance, each CentraSite object has a number of actions performed on it, and for each action a separate audit log is generated and stored in the CentraSite Registry Repository. This increases the size of the CentraSite Registry Repository dramatically. Failure to purge the excess log records in the database could cause problems. Therefore, the purge interval must be configured as required.
Each time you purge a log unit, the corresponding purging log entry is created and can be viewed in CentraSite Control. For example, when you purge a certain set of policy logs, the corresponding purging log entry is automatically created and is visible in the Policy Log page.