Server side logging

The Cinnamon CMS server uses Logback as its preferred logging mechanism. Other logging frameworks (log4j) are only used if an underlying library is incapable of SLF4J-compatible logging.

The configuration file is located in CINNAMON_HOME_DIR / logback.xml (or elsewhere, depending on your cinnamon_config.xml). If you want to know more about how the general configuration options, please consult the Logback manual.

Session based logging

Cinnamon has a feature called session based logging where everything that is identified as belonging to one user's session is logged into a special log file. You can enable it by using the element

 <use_session_logging>true</use_session_logging>

in the cinnamon_config.xml file.

Have a look at the following excerpt of a logback.xml configuration file:

<appender name="SIFT" class="ch.qos.logback.classic.sift.SiftingAppender">
   <discriminator>
        <Key>session</Key>
        <DefaultValue>unknown_session</DefaultValue>
  </discriminator>
  <sift>
  <appender name="FILE-${session}" class="ch.qos.logback.core.FileAppender">
    <File>${logFolder}/${session}.log</File>
    <Append>true</Append>
    <Layout class="ch.qos.logback.classic.PatternLayout">
          <Pattern>%-4relative [%thread] %-5level %mdc{user} %mdc{repo} %logger{35} %L - %msg%n</Pattern>
     </Layout>
    </appender>
  </sift>
</appender>

  <root level="DEBUG">
    <appender-ref ref="SIFT" />
    <appender-ref ref="FILE" />
  </root>

The important items are the discriminator keys. Those determine how the files are created and named. The key element must have one of the following values:

• user
  creates a user.log with all actions of this user - you may use this safely if there is only one repository installed.
  
• session
  creates a $sessionId.log (for example: 1.log, 5234324.log) with the current session's database id. You will get a lot of log files this way.
  
• repo
  creates one log (for example: cmn_test.log) for each repository. May be useful to track down bugs that only appear in one repository but where you do not know which user is responsible.
  
• repoUser
  creates a log with $repositoryName__$username (for example: cmn_test__admin.log), collecting all actions of a user.
  
• repoUserSession
  creates a log for each session of a user in a repository. This may be useful if you have multithreaded clients or background processes which use the same credentials but use forkSession to access a repository with multiple sessions.

Limitations

Not all actions can be directly attributed to a session or a user, for some commands to the server are made by unauthenticated guests (for example: login attempts) or the logging occurs outside the scope of the session handling code (for example: startup or shutdown procedures). You should have a general log running for those occasions, preferably one which has a sensible rollover policy and maximum size configured.