How to Use Categories 

Administrative personnel as well as system or application experts are using logs to monitor and analyze a software system. These people are in mostly organized according to specific tasks (like database administration, server hardware/OS administration, system administration, user management etc.). Since most customers are operating many systems (with different releases or from various suppliers), the administrative personnel must not need to understand the inner structure of the software systems they are operating. As long as log messages are affected, the consequence must be that messages belonging to the same type of tasks have to be available in one (or at least only few) lookup location(s). Therefore the general rule is that one has to choose category names according to groups of tasks and related main entities. This implies that messages can (and must) be written from different software components into the same category if they belong to the same group of tasks, respectively the same main entity.

Category names can be arranged hierarchically to reflect tasks and subtasks belonging together. Please keep in mind that subcategories will normally inherit properties of the parent category. Currently the following top-level categories are available:

·        System

This category contains messages related to system operation tasks. It has the subcategories Database, Network, Server, Security and Audit to reflect the main entities, respectively important groups of tasks.

·        Applications

This category contains messages related to application operation tasks.

·        Performance

This category is used for Single-Activity-Tracing.

In general, categories must be chosen with care to be kept as consistent as possible.