#337 – ACM and Load Balancers

This week on the podcast, Kyle and Dan discuss securing your public user and leaking information, how to speed up change assistant upgrade projects, and new ACM plugins to work with Load Balanced gateways.

The PeopleSoft Administrator Podcast hosted by Dan Iverson and Kyle Benson.

Show Notes

#290 – SameSite Cookies

This week on the podcast, Dan and Kyle talk about SameSite cookies and how the changes in browsers will affect PeopleSoft cookies, and they also discuss auditing PeopleSoft Security tables.

Show Notes


#73 – Oracle Configuration Manager

This week on the podcast, Kyle and Dan talk about Query Manager bugs, changing how they apply CPU Patches, and testing partial database refreshes. Then Dan gives an overview of Oracle Configuration Manager and laments it’s unsupported status.

Show Notes

  • Collaborate Sessions
  • PeopleTools Ideas Page @ 3:30
  • IDDA Logging Follow-up @ 4:15
  • Query Manager / JSON bug @ 6:00
  • Changing how you apply CPU Patches @ 10:15
  • ProcessRestartMemoryLimit Parameter @ 18:15
  • Testing localapp @ 24:45
  • PTF being slow @ 29:15
  • SRID in Access Log @ 32:30
  • Populating Correlation Fields @ 35:30
  • Partial database refresh to grab old code @ 37:30
  • [Keeping Older PI Images] (https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=1579720.1) @ 40:30
  • How do you do it: Booting domains: Serial or Parallel? @ 45:45
  • Oracle Configuration Manager @ 48:15

#68 – pscipher

This week, Dan and Kyle talk about IDDA logging, managing queries and different SAML options for PeopleSoft.. Then they talk about different strategies for using Demo databases and the pscipher utility.

Show Notes

PeopleSoft Instrumented Development Diagnostic Aid (IDDA)

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.

Bit Value Functional Category
1 PeopleSoft Internet Architecture
2 Integration Broker
4 Report repository
8 Portal
16 Web server caching
32 File processing (attachments)
64 Authentication
128 Performance Monitor
256 Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP)
512 Jolt

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.