When your system has been correctly configured and put into production, it is important to know how to monitor the system to detect problems. The tools presented in this chapter will also help you when you are troubleshooting your installation.
FotoWeb is capable of reporting its activities and any problems it may encounter to System Log, FotoWare Log Server and Windows Event Log as described in ‘System logging’. In normal conditions, it will be sufficient to set the logging level to Information on FotoWeb Log Service Filter and the FotoWare Log Server Filter. You may prefer to set the filter to Warning for the Windows Event Log Filter.
View this log regularly as the first step in monitoring the system. This log contains all the events reported by FotoWeb modules and can be viewed by clicking the System Log menu in the Administration Console.
The Information events report standard status of the processes. The Warning events indicate situations where something went wrong, but was more or less handled by FotoWeb. These events can also indicate reduction in functionality, so it is important to take note of them and try eliminating the problems reported by them. The highest level of events is the Error events. These events indicate serious errors encountered by FotoWeb that can have both external and internal causes. Occurrence of these events implies that you need to monitor the activities on the entire system to verify the source of error. At that point you can get assistance from FotoWare Log Server and Windows Event Log.
The FotoWare Log Server is installed alongside the Operations Center and will output log entries to the Operations Center status screen. Using the FotoWare Log Server has the following benefits:
Log events will be stored on disk
The log will also include events from other FotoWare products.
Another monitoring level provided through FotoWeb is through monitoring active sessions on the server. This can be done by clicking Active Sessions under each Site node. This view lists all active sessions on the site with number of requests made by each session and their idle times. Since there is a high correlation between the number of simultaneous users and system performance, this view can give vital information about your system.
If a user is trying to guess usernames and passwords to get access to your site, FotoWeb will eventually block the IP-address from further access. If you have logged into FotoWeb as a system administrator, you can view this list of addresses by accessing this URL: http://yourservername/fotoweb/cmdrequest/ ListBlockedIpAddresses.fwx
If System logging is configured to write events to Windows Event Log, then you can view the FotoWeb events in Windows Application Event Log along with events from all other application running on the system. From here, you can verify if there are other application failures/errors that are affecting FotoWeb in any manner. For example, an application can have consumed large amounts of system resources that cause FotoWeb to generate failure errors.
You can also configure performance monitoring on the system to monitor certain parameters such ISAPI requests and memory usage etc.
An erroneous site configuration can introduce security risks and incorrect functionality in FotoWeb. The site configuration can contain errors if it has been updated from an old FotoWeb version and/or modified manually or through custom scripts. Verify the site configuration to make sure that the users, groups, archives and destinations are configured optimally at all times for best performance and security. FotoWeb provides a tool to automatically verify the site configuration under the Site context menu at All Tasks | Verification | Verify Site Configuration.
System logging
The ‘System Log’ node displays all events reported by FotoWeb modules.
This view contains events according to the logging level set in the System | Properties | system logging. The system log provides important information about the status of FotoWeb and problems and errors it has encountered. The system log should be monitored regularly to make sure that the system is running properly and to find out and fix any potential problems as quickly as possible.
The system log can also be accessed from a web browser. Log in as a site administrator and access this URL:
http://<yourservername>/fotoweb/cmdrequest/SystemLog.fwx