In continuation of Part 1 on the ULS Log Viewer we will see more options to sort and filter errors in the ULS Log Viewer. The ULS Log Viewer is a very basic tool to monitor errors, warnings and issues in a SharePoint Farm.
You can filter errors by using the Text Filer. Enter "error" in the text filter and you will get filtered results as shown in Figure 4.
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 4: Filtering Errors in Log Viewer
Since the log file becomes bulky the filtering helps the SharePoint administrator to focus on issues in the farm. You can also filter on the Category drop down to get category-wise errors as shown in Figure 5.
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 5: ULS Viewer - Category Wise Errors List
If there are errors in your custom web controls then they will also be seen in the log viewer as shown in Figure 6.
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 6: ULS Viewer - Custom Web Controls Error
The ULS logs are a very important source of information to debug the errors, warnings and issues in the SharePoint Farm. Developers can use the SPDiagnosticsServiceBase.WriteTrace method in their code to write logging information to the logs with complete application information and custom strings.
When writing a trace log using the ULS API, you
must specify a severity level. The severity level is displayed in the ULS trace
log and is commonly used by reporting or filtering tools.
ULS Level Name |
Level ID |
Description |
Unexpected |
10 |
Similar to an Assert (an assumption
in code that a condition is true at a particular point), this message
indicates that a logic check failed that is atypical, or the message
returns an unexpected error code. These generally represent code bugs
that should be investigated and fixed. |
Monitorable |
15 |
Traces that indicate a problem, but
do not need immediate investigation. The intent is to collect data and
analyze it over time, looking for problem trends. |
High |
20 |
General functional detail, the high
priority events that happen in the environment. Examples include global
configuration modifications, service start and stop, timer jobs
completed, and so on. |
Medium |
50 |
Useful to help support or test teams
to debug customer or environmental issues. These likely include messages
indicating that individual features have succeeded or failed, such as
creating a new list, modifying a page, and so on. |
Verbose |
100 |
Useful primarily to help developers
debug low-level code failures. Not generally useful to anyone who does
not have access to source code or symbols. |
VerboseEx |
200 |
Useful for traces that are likely to
be high volume, especially information that is not needed for all
debugging scenarios. |
Summary
The ULS Log Viewer is a very basic tool to monitor errors, warnings and issues in a SharePoint Farm. There are many shortcomings of this tool, such as determination of the related details of an error or warning is cumbersome, also determining what is transpiring on the wire as in the case of services, workflows and apps is difficult. In the absence of any other you can use this tool.
References
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff512746(v=office.14).aspx