Configuring Selective Tracing Using WLST You can configure loggers for

Diagnosing Problems 13-3 For more information about WLDF, see Oracle Fusion Middleware Configuring and Using the Diagnostics Framework for Oracle WebLogic Server.

13.1.1 About Incidents and Problems

To facilitate diagnosis and resolution of critical errors, the Diagnostic Framework introduces two concepts for Oracle Fusion Middleware: problems and incidents. A problem is a critical error. Critical errors manifest as internal errors or other severe errors. Problems are tracked in the ADR. Each problem has a problem key, which is a text string that describes the problem. It includes an error code in the format XXX-nnnnn and in some cases, other error-specific values. An incident is a single occurrence of a problem. When a problem critical error occurs multiple times, an incident is created for each occurrence. Incidents are timestamped and tracked in the ADR. Each incident is identified by a numeric incident ID, which is unique within the ADR home. When an incident occurs, the Diagnostic Framework: ■ Gathers first-failure diagnostic data about the incident in the form of dump files incident dumps. ■ Stores the incident dumps in an ADR subdirectory created for that incident. ■ Registers the incidents dumps with the incident in ADR.

13.1.1.1 Incident Flood Control

It is conceivable that a problem could generate dozens or perhaps hundreds of incidents in a short period of time. This would generate too much diagnostic data, which would consume too much space in the ADR and could possibly slow down your efforts to diagnose and resolve the problem. For these reasons, the Diagnostic Framework applies flood control to incident generation after certain thresholds are reached. A flood-controlled incident is an incident that is not recorded in the ADR. Instead, the Diagnostic Framework writes a message at the WARNING level to the log file. Flood-controlled incidents provide a way of informing you that a critical error is ongoing, without overloading the system with diagnostic data. By default, if more than 5 incidents with the same problem key occur within 60 minutes, subsequent incidents with the same problem key are flood controlled. You can change this value using MBeans, as described in Section 13.3 .

13.1.2 Diagnostic Framework Components

The following topics describe the key components of the Diagnostic Framework: ■ Automatic Diagnostic Repository ■ Diagnostic Dumps ■ Management MBeans ■ WLST Commands for Diagnostic Framework ■ ADCRI Command-Line Utility

13.1.2.1 Automatic Diagnostic Repository

The Automatic Diagnostic Repository ADR is a file-based hierarchical repository for Oracle Fusion Middleware diagnostic data, such as traces and dumps. The Oracle Fusion Middleware components store all incident data in the ADR. Each Oracle WebLogic Server stores diagnostic data in subdirectories of its own home directory 13-4 Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrators Guide within the ADR. For example, each Managed Server and Administration Server has an ADR home directory. The ADR root directory is known as ADR base. By default, the ADR base is located in the following directory: DOMAIN_HOMEserversserver_nameadr Within ADR base, there can be multiple ADR homes, where each ADR home is the root directory for all incident data for a particular instance of Oracle WebLogic Server. The following path shows the location of the ADR home: ADR_BASEdiagofmdomain_nameserver_name Figure 13–1 illustrates the directory hierarchy of the ADR home for an Oracle WebLogic Server instance. Figure 13–1 ADR Directory Structure for Oracle Fusion Middleware The subdirectories in the ADR home contain the following information: ■ alert: The XML-formatted alert log. ■ incident: A directory that can contain multiple subdirectories, where each subdirectory is named for a particular incident. The subdirectories are named incdir_n, with n representing the number of the incident. Each subdirectory contains information and diagnostic dumps pertaining only to that incident. ■ others: Other subdirectories of ADR home, which store incident packages and other information. Note: ADR uses the domain name as the Product ID and the server name as the Instance ID when it packages an incident. However, if either name is more than 30 characters, ADR truncates the name. In addition, dollar sign and space characters are replaced with underscores.