Log Management Configuration

Adding The License Key

Without a valid license key, PortX/XpoLog will display a message like this:

Assuming you have not received a license key from XPLG, follow these steps:

If XpoLog software is not running, start the process:

• Go to the PortX/XpoLog installation directory
• Run the command: ./runXpoLog.sh start

Once the process starts,

• Open a browser window to the PortX/XpoLog home page:

• Click the PortX icon on the top left (or the Gear icon from the top right) corner of the web page:

• Select “SETTINGS”, and then “License” from the navigation panel.

• Click on the “Server Key” section at the bottom of the screen.
  This will generate a server key (this can be done once for a cluster set up as well).

• Copy the contents to a file and send them to XPLG Technical Support for receiving a Valid License Key.
  
• If already a license key is available, click “Choose file” under the “UPDATE LICENSE” section and select the license file.

• Click “Save”.
• A message will be displayed: “License updated successfully, click DONE to restart server”.
• Click DONE on the message box to restart PortX/XpoLog.
• Once the PortX/XpoLog interface comes up, there should be no warning about the license.

Log Management Configuration

Adding and Configuring External Storage for Data (Linux)

XPLGs’ Log Management platform can work with extremely large volumes of data from a large number and different system sources.

PortX/XpoLog uses disk space to analyze and index this data.

To ensure that the system has enough disk space available for these operations, it is recommended to use a separately mounted storage space for log data.

• For Amazon EC2-hosted PortX/XpoLog installations, we recommend using an EFS (Elastic File Store) volume.
• You can create a separate directory for PortX/XpoLog and mount that directory on the EFS volume.

The code snippet below shows a custom directory for PortX/XpoLog mounted on an EFS volume:

To make use of this mounted volume:

• Go to the PortX/XpoLog web interface.  Choose “SETTINGS” and then “System Settings” from the navigation menu.
  

• Under “General Settings”, check on the box “Use external configuration directory” and provide the absolute path to the external storage location. Here, we have specified the directory mounted on the EFS volume:

• Leave all other settings to default values and click the “Save” button on the top right corner of the screen.
• PortX/XpoLog will copy the necessary files to the new location:
  

• Click “OK” PortX/XpoLog will restart.
• Once the site interface reloads open the Settings > System Settings > General Settings tab and confirm that the new location was saved.
• You can now log into the EC2 instance and list the contents of the external storage. This should show something like this:

Log Management Configuration

Configuring File Settings (Linux)

Swappiness

The next step is to configure PortX/XpoLog for optimal memory, swap space, and open files.

Some of these changes will need to be made from Linux shell, others from PortX/XpoLog configuration file.

• Log in to the PortX/XpoLog EC2 instance if not already there.
• Switch to the root user or a user with root privileges.
• Run the command: ./runXpoLog.sh stop
• Once the process stops, check the swappiness settings.

The snippet below shows it’s set to 60% (default).

• Open the /etc/sysctl.conf file in a text editor and add or change the vm.swappiness setting like this:

vm.swappiness=10

• This setting will require a reboot.

Maximum Allowed Open Files and Number of Processes

• Check the maximum allowed number of open files for the user running the PortX/XpoLog process.
• If this value is less than 10,000, it needs to be changed to 10,000.

The snippet below displays a default value of 1024.

• Check the maximum allowed number of processes for the current user.
• This should be set to at least 20,000.

In the snippet below, it turns out to be 128537:

• Change the maximum number of open files and allowed processes by editing the /etc/security/limits.conf file.
• In the following snippet, the values for the root user are changed. You can change the user name to the account that’s running PortX/XpoLog:
  

Allocating Extra Memory to XpoLog (Linux and Windows)

The recommended value for memory assigned to PortX/XpoLog is 75% of total RAM.

The EC2 instance running PortX/XpoLog has 32 GB of RAM.

You will, therefore, assign 24 GB (75% of 32 GB) RAM to the PortX/XpoLog process.

To do this:

• Open the PortX/XpoLog configuration file (XpoLog.sh.lax) from the installation directory in a text editor.
• Replace the following line:
  
  lax.nl.java.option.additional=-Djava.library.path=bin/ -Djava.awt.headless=true –Xmx1024m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
  
  With this:
  
  lax.nl.java.option.additional=-Djava.library.path=bin/ -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx24576m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

• Save and close the file.
• Once the changes are made, reboot the EC2 instance.

Changing Service Account

By default, PortX/XpoLog service in Windows runs under the Local System account, which gives it full access to the local machine, but no access to the network.

Change the service’s property to run it under a domain account with sufficient network privileges.