Quickly Search Logs Using Weblogic Enterprise Manager

One of the most powerful ways to triage issues is the search feature in Weblogic's Enterprise Manager. The search allows one to search through the log files associated with all managed servers in the domain. Said a different way, it searches all Weblogic logs at once without even needing to login to a server. So if you have a 10 server footprint you would not have to log into 10 different servers to view the logs. 

There are many benefits to the search feature:

• View all lines from the last hour
• View only messages with criticality set to ERROR so you're not searching through lots of info and debug information
• Web-based interface no need to log into individual servers

One caveat to remember is the search only covers Weblogic logs. There are many other logs in Hyperion that this will not hit. However, it takes about 2 minutes to check, and usually the front end can give you a very good idea of what the error is. It's a great place to start troubleshooting.

To get started, start up the WebLogic admin server:

Oracle/Middleware/user_projects/domains/EPMSystem/bin/startWebLogic.sh

To access Enterprise Manager use the same url you would use to get to the admin server, but replace /console with /em

for instance:  http://server:7001/em

Once logged in,

WebLogic Domain -> EPMSystem -> Logs

Here you can see the powerful search interface. In this case we are searching 46 log files within the last hour for Errors. 

A detailed view of the results here show clearly Shared Services is failing due to a locked database account.

To sum up, it took about 60 seconds to login to EM and open the log interface to find this error. This can be a pretty powerful first place to start when troubleshooting issues. 

For this to be most useful, you should run the Weblogic admin server as a service so it is always available to login and look at logs. In Unix this is just a matter of starting the process. In Windows, you might want this quick tip to install the Admin Server as a Windows service:
http://epm-errors.blogspot.com/2016/07/running-weblogic-admin-server-as.html