PeopleSoft Instrumented Development Diagnostic Aid (IDDA)

Dan Iverson

I stumbled across this page about the PeopleSoft IDDA logger in PeopleBooks today. I haven’t seen this tool before, so I wanted to give it a quick test to see how it works. I wanted to know what type of data the IDDA logged and if the data would be useful for troubleshooting issues. After setting it up in a Development environment, I found that the PIA, Portal and Authentication traces would be helpful for sign on or cookie issues.

Enabling IDDA

You enabled the IDDA in a Web Profile Custom Property and by changing the IDDA log settings in logging.properties on your web server.

Web Profile

Go to your active Profile and add this custom value:

• Property Name: IDDA
• Validation Type: Number
• Property Value: The bit value, or sum of bit values, for the area you want to trace.

If you want to trace the PIA and Report Repository, enter a value of 5.

Save the Web Profile changes.

Logging Properties

Open the logging.properties file under webserv\domain\piaconfig\properties and change the .LEVEL value. These are the possibles values:

• OFF: Disables all IDDA logging.
• SEVERE: Displays server issues, such as premature termination and failure.
• WARNING: Displays less severe issues, such as configuration issues.
• INFO: Displays basic operational information, such as starting and stopping.
• FINE, FINER, FINEST: Displays internal non-critical informational messages.
• ALL: Enables all logging levels. The default value is INFO.

I tried ALL, FINEST and INFO during my testing. I ended up sticking with FINER since I felt that gave the best detail without too much information.

PeopleBooks has the wrong path documented if you look there. You can find the location of the logging.properties file by opening setEnv.cmd and looking at the PSLOGGING variable path. Save the changes and reboot your web server.

Viewing IDDA Data

IDDA output will write to webserv\domain\servers\PIA\logs\PIA_servlets.%u.log. The output is plain text so you view it in any text editor. The output is also tab-delimited, so importing the log files into Excel or another log view is easy.

Note: This was originally posted by Dan Iverson and has been transferred from a previous platform. There may be missing comments, style issues, and possibly broken links. If you have questions or comments, please contact [email protected].