BES Logs ... Tools I use to analyze them
Posted 06-27-2009 at 05:00 AM by hdawg
Parsing text BES logs ... it can be a royal pain; luckily there are PLENTY of tools out there to help. Without further ado, here's the list:
What tools do you use to review your log data?
If you've got any questions about the tools / methods I use feel free to post a question / comment in response to this post, or in the forum.
Tune in tomorrow to find out how long I recommend you keep BES log files around for, and why! If you've got any feedback or ideas for what you'd like to see more on please drop me a line.
- Notepad & Wordpad - Seriously, they are my #1 and #2 tools. They're installed on EVERY system by default, and I know all the shortcut keys. Just don't try to open up a 100 megabyte file in notepad ... sure it will open but it will be dog slow to respond. If I've got nothing else to use, I'll use Wordpad for the big files. When you're looking for something quick, nothing beats the old standby; notepad.
- Windows Grep - It is shareware, but isn't time-bombed or feature lacked if you don't register it. That said, she's worth every penny. If you're from the UNIX world at all you surely use grep, or ggrep, or igrep, or some variant of grep ... this has an excellent interface and works beautifully. Great for searching for a user or a string in 1 to 100s of files. Any time I'm researching a problem for a specific user I'll grab the logs for the entire day and will use Windows Grep to search through all of them for any reference to the user in question. A fantastic way to take thousands of lines of log down to just a few that you want to see.
- Textpad - If I could only choose one tool and have nothing else to parse logs this would have to be it. Textpad can load large files with no issue ... it also can do magic with macros and regular expressions. Want to convert TXT to XML or something else out of the ordinary with your data, Textpad will do it.
- BRK (BlackBerry Resource Kit) - Ok, so maybe I lied about if there was only one tool ... but I don't really consider the BRK to be the same as any of the other tools. A suite of tools that RIM has put together to do log analysis and data mining, the BRK is a suite of invaluable tools to every BES Admin that wants to know what is going on in their BES environment. Everything from how messages are moving throughout the mail / BES / wireless network, to knowing when a user is out of coverage, to seeing what applications are installed on BlackBerry handhelds, the BRK provides easy access to useful information that can easily be formatted into presentable reports. The suite of BRK tools deserves its own series of blogs ... which I will be doing after we finish the current series!
What tools do you use to review your log data?
If you've got any questions about the tools / methods I use feel free to post a question / comment in response to this post, or in the forum.
Tune in tomorrow to find out how long I recommend you keep BES log files around for, and why! If you've got any feedback or ideas for what you'd like to see more on please drop me a line.
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