SOA based Logging Service - part1

Finally its november, considered to be a lucky month for me. I thought I will start this month’s blogging with a non-technical article. I was recently working on designing and developing SOA foundation components which should be generic in nature and can be used for multiple clients. Heavy name rite ?? What was the SOA foundation component supposed to do??? It was supposed to be an Error Handling /Logging /Auditing/Notification Service. I really liked this idea since it involved lot of research and development. Lot of late nights/weekends and breaking of head.

So today I will give a brief on some factors that we considered while doing a requirement analysis of the Logging/Auditing feature of the service.

1. What to log – error data, auditing data, system problems data for troubleshooting, This list keeps growing
2. Log volume - Considering multiple systems in the environment there will be too many log messages.
3. Log diversity - logs generated by all look different .So need to standardize the log format across all platforms and systems.
4. Bad logs – bad logs are also a major challenge. Log messages which do not have enough information. Need to handle them properly.
5. Integrating different logging mechanisms – All applications will be having different ways of error handling and logging. So need to zero-in on the best approach.
6. Making sense of logs - Analyzing the logs based severity, system and other details. Use pre-defined standards.
7. Managing the logs – Using Console/Reporting tool get users to analyze and make best use of the logs.This list will keep growing. But for a generic service these are some factors which I can remember

In my coming blog’s I will write on different options we had in mind and what all features we included in our implementation.

Happy November J