Every time pmcd restarts, it starts a new pmcd.log, the old one
becomes pmcd.log.prev, and the old pmcd.log.prev is lost.
Many PMDAs do likewise
This sometimes makes it incredibly difficult to diagnose problems, because
if you happen to need to restart PCP once or twice while triaging a bug,
you lose all your logs. Worse, if you've obtained access to a machine
well after a problem has occurred, the logs might have all been rotated
away before you even got there.
We propose doing away with the ".prev" logfiles altogether, and just
continually appending to the main log files. Some "base OS" functionality
can then be used to rotate the log files as necessary, eg: on SLES, ship a
logrotate config file for PCP, which by default keeps log files around for
a long time (weeks/months) and let the logrotate package take care of log
rotation.
What thoughts?
Dr.Michael("Kimba")Newton kimbrr@xxxxxxx
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