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Sawmill Newsletter January 17, 2012 |
Welcome to the Sawmill Newsletter!
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News
Sawmill 8.5.5 is now available. This is the latest minor upgrade to Sawmill, improving reporting performance, adding some minor functionality, and fixing a few bugs. It is a free upgrade for Sawmill 8.5 users, and also a free upgrade for Sawmill 8.0/8.1 users (though your profiles and databases will need to be converted). You can download Sawmill 8.5.5 from http://sawmill.net/download.html . Please send your feedback about your experiences with Sawmill.
Sawmill 7 users can upgrade to Sawmill 8 for half of the license price; or if you have Premium Support, the upgrade is free. Major features of Sawmill 8 include support for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases, a completely redesigned web interface, better multi-processor and multi-core support, and role-based authentication control.
This issue of the Sawmill Newsletter gives an example of generating daily scheduled reports to timestamped directories, so each new report doesn't overwrite the report from the day before.
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Tips & Techniques: Generating Scheduled Reports To Timestamped Directories
The Sawmill Scheduler allows a variety of actions to be executed periodically, including database updates, and scheduled reports. (8.5.5 also adds an option to run an arbitrary command line from the Scheduler). A typical installation has a nightly database update of all changing profiles (profiles which have new log data generated each day), sometimes followed by a report generation. Reports can be emailed, or they can be generated to disk.
When reports are generated periodically to disk, the Schedule asks for a particular pathname to which the report should be written. If only yesterday's report is needed, that works fine, and each report overwrites the previous day's report. But to generate a series of historical reports to disk, they need to be rotated, or each written to a different location. Fortunately, Sawmill's Scheduler makes this possible, through the use of embedded Salang in the directory name.
Salang, the Sawmill language, is a full-featured scripting language which is used throughout Sawmill, for log filters, database filters, log format plug-ins, custom actions, snapons, and more (the entire web interface to Sawmill is written in Salang). In certain cases, Salang code can be embedded in a parameter value using the tokens {= and =}; it will be automatically evaluated, and the result inserted back into the position of the bracketed range. For instance, a value of "Hello {=1+1=} U" will be converted to "Hello 2 U", as the Salang expression 1+1 is evaluated to 2. One place this is supported, is in the "Output directory" option of the Scheduler page for "Generate report files." A Salang expression embedded in the filename can be used to create a different directory each day.
To create a schedule which generates timestamped reports, start in the Scheduler and click New Schedule. Enter a name like "Timestamped Daily Single-Page Summary" in the Name field, and click the pencil icon ([No action defined]) to define an action. Choose as the Action "Generate report files," the Profile, and the Report you want to generate (in this case, Single-page Summary). Then enter the expression in the Output directory. The screen shot below doesn't show the whole expression, but it's:
 {='/d/Sawmill Reports/' . replace_all(substr(epoc_to_local_date_time(now()), 0, 11), '/', '')=}
Here's what it looks like on the screen:
We'll examine the mechanics of that expression below. For now, click OK, choose a scheduled time, Save Changes, and you're done. Every night, it will generate reports to a directory with a name like:
 /d/Sawmill Reports/17Jan2012
You can test it right now, if you like, by clicking Run Now.
On Windows, there's one wrinkle: because backslashes are used as dividers in Windows, and also as escape characters in Salang, you need you use two backslashes any time you want a directory divider, like this:
 {='C:\\Sawmill Reports\\' . replace_all(substr(epoc_to_date_time(now()), 0, 11), '/', '')=}
which will give you reports in a directory with a name like:
 C:\\Sawmill Reports\\17Jan2012
Breaking Down The Expression
The complicated part of this process is the expression, so let's take a minute to look at how it works, working outward in layers from now().
1. "now()" returns the current time in EPOC format (seconds since January 1, 1970, UTC).
2. Working outward, "epoc_to_local_date_time(now())" returns the local time on the Sawmill server (not UTC) as a string, something like "17/Jan/2012 12:34:56".
3. Working outward, "substr(epoc_to_local_date_time(now()), 0, 11)" returns the first 11 characters of that, which will be "17/Jan/2012".
4. Working outward, "replace_all(substr(epoc_to_local_date_time(now()), 0, 11), '/', '')" removes all /s (replacing them with empty strings), yielding "17Jan2012". This isn't necessary on Windows, but on other platforms, those /s will become directory dividers, which you probably don't want.
5. Finally, "'/d/Sawmill Reports/' . replace_all(substr(epoc_to_local_date_time(now()), 0, 11), '/', '')" concatenates "/d/Sawmill Reports/" to the value computed, yielding the final pathname, "/d/Sawmill Reports/17Jan2012".
Advanced Applications
Since the code in the {==} section is Salang, it can do anything Salang can do, which is pretty much anything any programming language can do. Salang can call other programs, create and call subroutines, read information from files, make network connections (functionality for HTTP, HTTPS, and LDAP, in particular, are included in Sawmill's Salang libraries), etc. So the directory could name could be computed in any way, e.g., looking it up the profile name in a database server via an HTTP request, computing an LDAP DN from that, looking up the group with a query to an LDAP server, and using the group name in the directory name. The most common situation is just to embed a timestamp, but more advanced calculations are possible.
Also, the Subject of an emailed report can contain Salang in a {==} section, to timestamp the emailed report, or to include other information (date range of database, etc.).
Professional Services
This newsletter describes the use of Salang to generate scheduled reports to timestamped directories. If you need a different timestamp format than the one shown above, or a more advanced computed directory name, our Sawmill Experts can help. Contact consulting@sawmill.net for more information.
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