[Enterprise Extensions only]

The activity log for problem determination

The activity log captures events that show a history of WebSphere Application Server enterprise services' activities. Some of the entries in the log are informational and others report on system exceptions, such as returned CORBA exceptions.

If you encounter enterprise services runtime errors, you often find it useful to read the activity log and try to diagnose the problem yourself. After this, if you still need assistance from IBM to help you diagnose problems, you are asked to provide the formatted activity log output to IBM.

There is one activity log for each host machine. The activity.log file resides in the WebSphere Application Server's service subdirectory. The activity log file is created automatically when the first log entry needs to be written.

Before you can read the contents of an activity log, you must format the log file. You can also merge and format multiple log files into a single output file, sort and display the contents of activity logs in various groupings. For more information about formatting an activity log, see Formatting the activity log.

For more information about the data fields of entries in the activity log, see Fields in a formatted activity log entry.