Using centralized logging to enable the mustGather trace

You can use centralized logging to easily enable mustGather traces and follow the flow of a request through both the ODR and application server tiers.

Before you begin

Centralized logging is a tool to help you collect the data necessary for troubleshooting and diagnosing a problem. However, for performance reasons, the features of centralized logging are not enabled all the time. Therefore, you must enable the centralized logging features when you anticipate capturing a particular problem.
When you run the mustgather.py script, trace specifications are overwritten. If you want to restore the trace specifications, save the trace strings before you run the script.
If you use the remote log collection feature of the mustgather.py script, ensure that your target file system has the appropriate amount of space necessary to contain the gathered log files.

About this task

Using centralized logging, you can enable tracing based on the type of problem that you experience, for example, 503 HTTP response codes. With centralized logging, specific types of mustGather documents can be identified by predefined strings. Some examples of predefined mustGather documents include application editioning, 404 error and 503 response codes, health monitoring, and more.

You can also enable rule-based tracing which allows you to set trace strings based on the content of a request when the request arrives

Procedure

Run the mustgather.py script to enable tracing, collect mustGather documents, and disable tracing. Depending on the mustgather type, different trace strings will be set on appropriate servers in the cell. When the logs are collected by the script, the logs will be retrieved to the system where the script runs.

The supported commands are included in the following list:

enable [mustgatherType]: Enables tracing
collect [mustgatherType] [destination]: Collects a specific type of mustGather document
disable [mustgatherType]: Disables tracing

Determine the type of mustGather document that you need.
The supported types of mustGather documents are included in the following list:

404

404 HTTP response code

503

503 HTTP response code

504

504 HTTP response code

agent

node agent

appedition

Application edition manager

apc

Application placement controller

arfm

Autonomic request flow manager

dc

Dynamic cluster

hadmgr

High availability deployment manager

hmm

Health monitoring

odr

On demand router

operations

Visualization issues with the Extended Deployment and Operations tabs

reports

Visualization issues with the Reports tab

reportsPerf

Visualization issues with performance data that is displayed on the Reports tab

repository

Extended Repository Service

sip

SIP request routing
Run the enable command with the appropriate mustGather type specified to set the appropriate tracing on all relevant servers in the cell.
```
wsadmin -lang jython -f c:\WebSphere\AppServer\bin\mustgather.py enable 404
```
Recreate the desired scenario.
Run the collect command with the appropriate mustGather type and a destination file specified to collect the local and remote mustGather documents.
```
wsadmin -lang jython -f c:\WebSphere\AppServer\bin\mustgather.py collect 404 
"c:\\mydocs\\collection.zip"
```
Run the disable command with the appropriate mustGather type specified. Running this command sets the trace to *=info on all relevant servers in the cell.
```
wsadmin -lang jython -f c:\WebSphere\AppServer\bin\mustgather.py disable 404
```