Maintenance, error logs and monitoring (for System Admins)
Updated
Maintenance
Most maintenance operations such as server upgrades, or new RSpace installations will be performed on the server. However, through the Maintenance tab you can give your users notice of forthcoming downtime, for example for a server restart or update.
Steps
- Go to System->Maintenance
- Click on the ‘Schedule downtime’ submenu
- Set the times the server will be down for, and an optional message. If you need to urgently update, then you can prevent users logging in with immediate effect.
- Once set, users will see this information at the top of any RSpace page.
- 10 minutes before the downtime is due to start, further logins will be prevented, and users will see an alert warning them to finish their work and log off.
You can cancel or edit this downtime period from the same page.
If you want to login to RSpace yourself during the downtime period, there is a special URL /login?maintenanceLogin which will enable you, as a sysadmin, to login. For example, if you schedule 1 hour downtime, but the upgrade is complete in 10 minutes, you might want to cancel the downtime so that users can continue with their work.
Error reporting
If a user reports an error, you might want to view the error log or send the server logs to RSpace support. This feature is a merely a convenience feature to view the server logs from within the RSpace application.
In order for this to work, the deployment property TODO should be set to the location of the server error file. This will be in one of two locations, depending on your RSpace version:
- For 1.30 or earlier, the file will be TOMCAT/logs/catalina.out, where TOMCAT is the top-level folder of your Tomcat install
- For 1.31 or later, the file will called ‘error.log’ and will be in the folder specified by the deployment property
logging.dir. If this is not explicitly set, the file will be in TOMCAT folder by default.
Once the server has been started with these deployment properties correctly set, you will be able to view logs or send them to RSpace via the System->Maintenance page. These pages only show the most recent logs, so if the reported error cannot be reproduced, or is old, you might need to investigate the server logs on the server itself.
As of version 1.35 Information on versions of RSpace components are logged on startup for reference when reporting issues.
Monitoring
The Monitoring page, introduced in 1.30, replaces the old ‘Performance’ page with more comprehensive and reliable information concerning CPU usage, memory consumption, and throughput. From these graphs, you will be able to tell the load thesystem is under, when the peaks of activity are, to help with your resource planning. This page is available through the System->Monitoring menu.
