Understanding logging

Logging is important in a streaming media system for a variety of reasons:

• Client activity and server activity logs allow you to keep a record of what you have streamed from your server and to whom.
• Log information can help you track the usage of your server and estimate when you might need to add more resources to your system.
• Log files can assist you in planning your security implementation. If your system is subjected to a denial of service attack, log files can help you determine which clients are being used in the attack.
• Log files can help you identify user-reported issues with your streaming system by providing event codes that correspond to common issues.
• Log files provide historical data for use in trend analysis and business cases.

The log files created by the WMS Logging plug-in are space delimited text files that adhere to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for log files. Each entry in the log file corresponds to a server or client event and has corresponding result code. For more information about log file entries and result codes, see Log file reference information.

By default, log files created by the WMS Client Logging plug-in are saved to %systemroot%\System32\LogFiles\WMS and log files created by the Multicast and Advertisement Logging Agent are saved to %systemroot%\System32\LogFiles\WMS_ISAPI. If you do not have adequate disk space on the drive to which log files are being written, the logging plug-in will stop logging and post a warning message to the troubleshooting list.

This section contains the following topics:

• Reading log files
• About GUID types
• Comparing log features
• Simulating logs

Related topics

• Logging data and events