Job History and Log

The job server keeps a historic log of all the activity from each running job. We can look at this from a few different points of view. The job history is a view which shows us from the log data, each time a specific job was started. Let us use the example from the previous section and locate "Sleeper Job" and right click on in and select View History from the pop-up menu. When you do this, you will see a nice concise set of information taken from the log which shows all the times it has recorded the job being started. It provides some of the basic overall statistics for the job such as the total elapsed time, the completion status and outcome.

To delve into even more precise data, you can see the full log detail by double-clicking on any one of the run entries in the history grid. That will bring up the full log detail for just this individual run of the job. In the log detail, you will see step by step entries of what happened during the job process from start to finish. Double-clicking on any of the individual log entries will show the log detail record which for any entries that might contain a much lengthier message or set of messages than can be displayed in the grid, will get shown in a full view. It also provides you with a method to copy the log entry information to the clipboard if needed.

This may be the most useful way to look at specific activity that occurred during a known run of a job definition. However, you also can view and search the entire raw log for the entire JobServer. To open the whole server log, just click on the Log button that is found on the main toolbar. This opens the whole log viewer which you can scroll through or use the assorted options to filter out entries to locate specific events that might be occurring across multiple jobs. An example of one thing you might use this for is to click on the dropdown for the Level filter at the top of the log window and select (check) the Error option. Once you do that, you should see a list of all log entries for all runs of every job on the server that might have recorded an error event. By reviewing each one, you can assess if the recorded errors might be due to normal environmental issues that might happen, or if there is some intervention needed to correct an issue somewhere.

The log system in JobServer.NET is self-managing and you do not need to take any specific actions to maintain it. It automatically keeps itself pruned to a reasonable size by purging data older than 90 days (about 3 months) or over one hundred thousand entries.