Log Collection: Troubleshoot

This topic describes the format and content of Log Collection Troubleshooting. NetWitness Platform informs you of Log Collector problems or potential problems in the following two ways.

• Log files.
• Health and Wellness Monitoring views.

Junk Syslog Messages

The remote log collector has been made looser in regards to how it handles syslog messages. This was done to reduce the number of dropped messages due to missing parts of the header, or for other minor formatting errors. However, this might also allow syslog event messages that contain junk to get through the parser. If you see such messages in the system, you can add a syslog collection filter to remove events that are sending these messages.

Log Files

If you have an issue with a particular event source collection protocol, you can review debug logs to investigate this issue. Each event source has a Debug parameter that you can enable (set parameter to On or Verbose) to capture these logs.

Caution:  Only enable debugging if you have a problem with this event source and you need to investigate this problem. If you have Debug enabled all the time it will adversely affect the performance of the Log Collector.

Health and Wellness Monitoring

Health and Wellness monitoring makes you aware of potential hardware and software problems in a timely manner so that you can avoid to outages. RSA recommends that you monitor the Log Collector statistical fields to make sure that the service is operating efficiently and is not at or near the maximum values you have configured. You can monitor the following statistics (Stats) described in the (Admin) > Health & Wellness view.

Sample Troubleshooting Format

RSA NetWitness Platform returns the following types of error messages in the log files for.