MapGuide tidbits: Log monitoring

When I talked about my MapGuide dev tools of choice a while back, I mentioned how valuable BareTail is for viewing the MapGuide log files as they get written.

Now if for some reason, you cannot use or install BareTail on the MapGuide Server box, the MapGuide Site Administrator comes with a built-in log file viewer.

Firstly, log into your MapGuide Site Administrator. Then click the Manage Logs link in the sidebar

In the log management page, click the log you want to view

This will spawn a new popup window containing the contents of the log file

You can configure this window to auto-refresh at a certain interval, which will approximate the functionality of BareTail. Since log files can grow really large, it's best to set the viewer to only view that last n records from the log file, which you can also specify.