Automatically archiving logfiles written by MonitorWare Agent.
Article created 2008-11-27
by Andre Lorbach.
This article was written by using the
MonitorWare Agent, but it can also be
applied to EventReporter
and WinSyslog.
By default the log files generated by MonitorWare Agent
using the WriteFile Action are written on a daily basis, so you have
one log file for each day. Over time this can become a huge number
uncompressed log files, so you properly want to archive them automatically to
save disk space. There is no inbuilt method in MonitorWare Agent yet to do so,
but this article will describe how you can archive this goal by using the
Windows Task Scheduler and WinRar.
1. Installing and
Configuring MonitorWare Agent
1.1 Download and
Install MonitorWare Agent
1.2 Setup up basic
MonitorWare Agent configuration
1.3 Configure the Write File
Action.
1.4 Start MonitorWare Agent
2. Configure log file archiving
2.1 Download and Install WinRar
2.2
Create VBScript which utilizes WinRar to create archives.
2.3 Create Task in Windows
Task Scheduler
Final Thoughts
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So if you haven't done so already, go to
www.mwagent.com and download
the latest MonitorWare Agent version. It is always recommended to use the latest
Version of MonitorWare Agent. Once the download is done, go ahead and install
it. You may have to restart after installation, this depends on your system.
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 Start
the MonitorWare Agent client and skip the wizard on startup. In
this article, we will use an EventLog Monitor as source for our File logging,
but you can use any other kind of source. Create a new
"EventLog Monitor" service and
just name it "EventLog Monitor". You can
leave all configuration settings as they are in the screenshot on the right.
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 In order to create
log files we need a Write File Action. Create a new Write File
Action like in the screenshot on the right. The default settings will create
daily log files automatically. You may customize the log format by using the custom "File
format" option. It is important to have the "Create unique filenames" Option enabled, this
will enable the daily written log files.
The log file name for 2008-11-28 would be MonitorWare-2008-11-28.log, and for the
next day MonitorWare-2008-11-29.log and so on.
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 After
you configured MonitorWare Agent, you can start the Service and verify that
the daily log files are successfully written.
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 Visit
the
RarSoft
website to
download the latest Version of WinRar, if you haven't installed it already. There are plenty of other
packer
applications out there and this article may also be used with them. However
I will focus on using WinRar.
Once you downloaded WinRar, start it's installation, and remember the exact
path it was installed to. Usually this is "C:\Program
Files\WinRAR" or "C:\Program Files (x86)\WinRAR".
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This script will actually do the work for you. It is designed to
automatically generate the filename of the log file from yesterday, and
create an archive with the same name. If the archive is successfully
created, the log file will automatically be deleted. The script is also in
the script package which you can download at the top. You can
also copy the script content from the textbox below, and create a new file
archive_logs.vbs yourself.
By default the script will create zip files, if you rather want to create
rar files, just remove the -afzip parameter from the variable szCommand at
the end of the script.
 The
next thing to do is to edit this script to your needs. There are 4 parameters at
the top which you may need to customize, so the script fits into your
environment.
szWinRardirectory - contains the full installation of your WinRar
installation
szBasedirectory - Same as the Basedirectory parameter as in your WriteFile
action
szBaseName - Same as the BaseName parameter in your WriteFile action.
szExtension - Same as the Extension parameter in your WriteFile action.
Once you have done this, you should run the script at least
once manually by double clicking it to see if it works. You may only notice a short popup of the
WinRar Windows, depending if a log file to archive can be found, and
archiving takes some time. If it works, you should see a zip-packed log file in
your logs directory, like in this screenshot.
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 Open
the Control Panel, and go to the scheduled tasks. From there you can create
a new scheduled task using a wizard. Once the wizard is opened, click on
browse to manually select the "archive_logs.vbs" script.
Then proceed to the next step of the wizard.
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 Choose
"Daily", and set the start time in the next wizard step. I have
chosen 02:00 am in this article, but you can also chose 04:00am or 01:00am. It should
not be 00:00am, because the script might archive the log file too early.
In the next step you have to configure the
Username and Password, the task is going to run under. Once you finished
creating the scheduled task, right click it in the task list and select
"Run" in order to test that the task is working.
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I hope this article will help you solving your tasks and shows you the
potential of MonitorWare Agent, and what you can archive with it. Feel free to
email me for recommendations or questions.
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