Overview

Text Logs are other log formats supported by GFI EventsManager. 

• W3C logs¹ are text-based flat files containing various event details delimited by special characters.
• The W3C log format is most commonly used by hardware systems (Example: servers and appliances) which have Internet-specific roles.
• Microsoft® Internet Information Server (IIS) service and Apache web servers for example, can collect web related events such as web logs, in the form of W3C formatted text files.

In GFI EventsManager, the configuration process of W3C log parameters is identical to that performed for Windows® event processing, with one exception. Unlike Windows® Event Logs, there is no standard which dictates a specific or centralized folder location where W3C log files are stored on disk. Therefore, in order to collect W3C logs, you must specify the complete path to these text-based log files.

Process

Warning: Deleting event logs without archiving may lead to legal compliance penalties.

To collect Text logs:

1. From Configuration tab > Event Sources, right-click an event source or group and select Properties.
2. Click the Text Logs tab > Add... to add folder paths containing Text Logs. 
3. From the Select text logs folder... dialog, enter the path to the folder containing the text logs files and Click OK.
4. Select Clear collected events after completion to clear the collected events from the respective event source.
5. Select Process subdirectories to recursively scan the specified path that contains the text logs.
6. From Parsing schema drop-down menu, select the schema in which Text Logs are interpreted. Select from:
   • W3C
   • CSV
   • DHCP
   • XML
   • SAP Logs
   • ESM Logs
   • SKIDATA Car Park Payments.
7. Select Archive² all logs without any further processing to archive collected events without applying events processing rules.
8. Select Process the logs with the rules selected below before archiving and select the rule sets that you want to run against the collected events.
9. Click Apply and OK.

¹W3C is a common log format developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. W3C logs are text-based flat files used mainly by web servers including Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) to record web-related events such as weblogs.

²A collection of events stored in the SQL Server-based database backend of GFI EventsManager.