Monitor 4D Server activity with this new tool

May 27, 2020 3 min read

Many features have been released to help you manage your 4D Server activity. 4D v18 R3 provides 4D administrators another monitoring tool for 4D Server activity. A tool to get all operations executing beyond a specified time, as well as relevant details about the involved tables, fields, and clients.

This feature not only makes all the above is possible, it also makes it easier to optimize your code, identify problems, and liberate your 4D Server resources.

HDI: Monitor your 4D application activity

4D introduces a new set of commands to monitor your 4D application. They allow you to record activity (in memory) lasting more than a given time limit.

You can specify the kind of activity you want to monitor:

4D data activity: operations involving the 4D data itself,
Network activity: you’ll get the same information as in the 4DRequestsLog file (*),
Language execution: you’ll get the same information as in the 4DDebugLog file (*).

(*) There’s no need to activate the corresponding log files, so no space on the disk is used.

START MONITORING ACTIVITY command

The START MONITORING ACTIVITY command takes the duration threshold and the type of operations to monitor as parameters. For this, the following new constants can be used to monitor:

Activity operations: operations in the 4D data
Activity network: operations of the network activity

Activity language: operations of the language execution

Get Monitored Activity command

When you want to get all the recorded activity, just call the new Get Monitored Activity() command!

It returns a collection of objects with the relevant information that you can use as you wish (generate a file, display an interface for the administrator, etc.).

STOP MONITORING ACTIVITY command

When you want to stop recording your 4D application activity or to empty the memory, just call the STOP MONITORING ACTIVITY command.

concrete EXAMPLE

In most cases, your need will be:

Every 10 minutes, I want to check if some operations have lasted more than 10 seconds on my 4D Server. If yes, I want to send an email to the administrator (or take another action).

The following is some code to do just that.

ON server startup method

C_LONGINT($monitorProcessId) STOP MONITORING ACTIVITY // Detect 4D data operations which lasted more than 10s START MONITORING ACTIVITY(10;Activity operations) //Run a monitoring process $monitorProcessId:=New process("monitorOperations";0;"Monitor operations")

monitoring process (to be run on the server)

C_COLLECTION($activities) While(Not(Process aborted)) // Inspect 4D data activity every 10 minutes DELAY PROCESS(Current process;36000) // Get the long operations and exclude backup operations $activities:=Get Monitored Activity().query("Not(activityData.message IN :1)";New collection("@backup@")) If ($activities.length#0) // Send an email to the administrator with $activities details // Empty the memory and restart the monitoring STOP MONITORING ACTIVITY START MONITORING ACTIVITY(10;Activity operations) End if End while

on server shutdown method

C_COLLECTION($activities) $activities:=Get Monitored Activity().query("Not(activityData.message IN :1)";New collection("@backup@")) If ($activities.length#0) // Send an email to the administrator with $activities details End if

Check out the HDI to learn more!

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