Understanding Spotfire Logging

This has been a busy, busy week. I’ve never posted an article a day before. I kicked off the week with my first post on Spotfire logging. I explained how to set up and configure logging, as well as install logging information links and a DXP with logging data. My second post explained how to interpret the data in the ACTIONLOG information link. The third post explained log categories and actions so that in the fourth post you could understand how to use all the other logging views. This is the final post of the week, which wraps everything up. It will explain how to join logging data sets to get exactly the logging data you need. Read on to find out more.

This is post 4 of 5 in my one-a-day series on Spotfire logging. Each post builds on the previous. Yesterday, I explained logging categories and actions. Today, I will show you how that knowledge will help you know what to do with all the other views with logging data. Read on to learn how to use all of the Spotfire logging views.

Welcome to my Wednesday logging post, number 3 of 5 this week. The first post explained how to set up your Spotfire installation to log user actions. The second post detailed the questions you can ask and answer using the ACTIONLOG. This post sets the stage to understand all of the other logging views by taking a closer look at the LOG_CATEGORY and LOG_ACTION columns. With a good understanding of these categories, you’ll be able to use even more of the log data. Read on to learn more.

Yesterday, I posted on how to set up logging in Spotfire. At the end of that post, I showed you just how much data is available with logging, and it’s a lot. But, there is one place you can go to answer most logging question — the ACTIONLOG view. So, in this post, I will explain how to use the Spotfire ACTIONLOG data to understand user activity. We’ll ask and answer important questions like…

• Is usage increasing or decreasing?
• Is training helping users?
• Who isn’t using their license?
• Who are my top users?
• What are the most commonly used files?
• Who deleted my information link?

Read on to learn more.

Last week, my manager asked the question — “Is anything connected to xyz information link?” So, I showed users how to answer that question with a simple search in the Library Administrator. This week, I was asked — “Who isn’t using their license?” This is also a fairly simple question to answer if you have logging setup and understand the maze of views containing logging data. While I felt like I had a pretty solid understanding of logging, I didn’t understand all the data I was seeing. So, I had to reach out to TIBCO for clarity. Ultimately, I wound up going down a very deep rabbit hole learning even more about logging. Since there isn’t much out there on logging, I distilled it all into 5 blog posts that will be released one at a time Monday thru Friday. This post kicks it off by explaining how to set up Spotfire logging. Read on to learn more.