Monday, February 10, 2020

Server Messages: Another Release-Defining Feature in Foxhound Version 5

From time to time the SQL Anywhere server sends important error, warning and diagnostic messages to three separate destinations:

  • the "server console" window. . . unless that window doesn't exist because the server was started as a Windows service,

  • the text file named in the -o filename.txt option. . . unless that option was omitted from the server startup command line, and

  • result sets returned by sa_server_messages(). . . if you call it.
The capture and display of sa_server_messages() data is one of the features that makes Foxhound 5 stand apart from previous versions.

Foxhound merges server messages and monitor samples in descending order by timestamp, making it easy to see "What else was going on?" at any particular point.

Here's what server messages look like for a secondary (mirror) server that became the primary after a  failover :

Your applications can write their own server messages, and they will appear in the Foxhound Monitor and History pages like this:
MESSAGE STRING ( 'INFO message' ) TO CONSOLE;
MESSAGE STRING ( 'WARN message' ) TYPE WARNING TO CONSOLE;
MESSAGE STRING ( 'ERR message'  ) TYPE ACTION TO CONSOLE;

1:17:09 PM          -- E. ERR message (2ms) 
1:17:09 PM          -- W. WARN message (11ms) 
1:17:09 PM          -- I. INFO message (1m 53s) 
For more information see The Sample History Page - Server Messages.


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