Welcome to the Chainsaw v2 Tutorial. Here you will learn how to effectively utilise the many features of Chainsaw.

Conventions

To assist you, the following documentation conventions will be used

Outline

The built-in tutorial installs several "pretend" Receiver plugins that generate some example LoggingEvents and post them into Log4j just like a real Receiver.


When you are ready to begin the tutorial, click here, or click the "Start Tutorial" button in this dialog's toolbar.


Receivers

After you have said yes to the confirmation dialog, you should see 3 new tabs appear in the main GUI. This is because the tutorial has installed 3 'Generator' Receivers into the Log4j engine.

Any installed receiver installed into Log4j, either via an external configuration file, or via the GUI, is shown in this panel. You can create new Receivers, stop existing ones, or adjust their threshold.

Tabs

You may have noticed that each of the tabs have specific names ("Generator X"). Chainsaw automatically looks inside each received LoggingEvent for a special Application property to determine which tab to route an event to. If it cannot find this property, it attempts to use a secondary property usually added via the SocketAppender or SocketHubAppender which identify the remote host of these events. If neither of these are found, Chainsaw routes events to a default "Unknown" tab. You can learn more about this whole process here. TODO

Log Tabs

Each tab contains a series of LoggingEvents routed to it via the Chainsaw internals. This visual panel is known as the Log Panel. It contains 3 main areas:

  1. Events panel - The top/central panel contains a table of all the events received, and the Refinement filter (more on this later)
  2. Event Detail panel - The bottom/central panel contains more details information of the currently selected event in the table.
  3. Logger Tree panel - the left hand panel contains all the distinct loggers known from the received LoggingEvents represented in the natural dotted hierarchy.
The Logger Tree & Event Detail panels can be hidden by clicking on the 'X' close icon in their respective top left corners, or by using the toolbar or menus. They are also contained within a split area, so you can adjust the amount of visual space they take up to your liking.

Events panel

The Events panel primary role is to display received events in a table. Events are colored based on certain rules, with a default set of rules coloring a row based on the LoggingEvent level: Red for ERROR, Yellow for WARN.

Each of the columns can be moved and resized. When you exit, Chainsaw will remember these settings automatically.

The popup menu on this panel contains some handy features:

Event Detail panel

The Event Detail panel shows a more detailed view of the currently selected LoggingEvent from the Events panel. The format of the event information is determined by the layout chosen. Internally Chainsaw uses Log4j's Layout classes, so if you are familiar with them, you'll feel right at home. The default layout uses a PatternLayout with HTML formatting.

Logger Tree panel

TODO

Filtering

TODO

Shutting down the Tutorial

When you are finished with the tutorial, you can simply shutdown all the Generator receivers:

For convenience you can simply click here or click on the Stop Tutorial button in this dialogs toolbar, and Chainsaw will stop all the tutorial generators for you (If you created any other non-Generator Receivers, they will be left untouched).


Transmission Ends