GUIDE 4
Configuring PortX/XpoLog After Installation

XPLG Products Suite 

This guide covers the Post-Installation log management configuration for PortX, XpoLog XPLG log Management Product Suite .
There are several configuration steps necessary after PortX/XpoLog has been successfully installed.
Installing PortX/XpoLog is simple as shown in the Installation QuickStart Guides
(Find the latest product version  XPLG Free Download.)


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:

browse XpoLog center homepage

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

Setting up portX

  • 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).

Generate a server key

  • 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.

If a license key is available, click “Choose file” under 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:

The code snippet below shows a custom directory for 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:

Add / Configure External Storage

  • 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:

Add / Configure External Storage

XpoLog Post Installation Configuration

  • 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:

Add / Configure External Storage

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).

 check the swappiness settings

  • 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 open files for the current user

  • 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:

Check the maximum allowed number of processes for the current user

  • 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:

Change the maximum number of open files and allowed processes

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.

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

Log Management Configuration
Configuring Security

Ideally, PortX/XpoLog should be available to authorized users only.

There are a few different ways to configure this:

  • Using PortX/XpoLog’s own security model. Here, each user logs in with their username and password, and the credentials are managed by XpoLog internally
  • Using Active Directory accounts
  • Using Single Sign-on with CA SiteMinder or IBM WebSEAL.

You will now enable PortX/XpoLog-based security and create an admin user for accessing the console.

  • Click the PortX icon on the top left (or the Gear icon from the top right) corner of the web page:
  • Choose “Settings > System Settings” and then  click on the “Security” tab:

  • Select the “Activate Security” checkbox and ensure that only “XpoLog Realm” is selected in the “Selected items” column of the Authentication table.

Select the “Activate Security” checkbox and ensure that only “XpoLog Realm” is selected in the “Selected items” column of the Authentication table.

  • A message will be displayed saying security is being configured. After the process completes, XPLG Product Suite will reload and prompt for username and password.

  • The default username and password are admin and admin.
  • Once logged in with these credentials, the username is displayed on the top right corner of the page:

Once logged in with these credentials, the username is displayed on the top right corner of the page

  • With security enabled, a new menu item named “Security” is added to the PortX/XpoLog Manager navigation menu.
    Select “User General Settings”:

  • From the next screen, change the admin user’s password:

change the admin user’s password

Conclusion

We have now learned how to make a number of configuration changes to the XPLG Product Suit, PortX/XpoLog after it’s installed.

The changes we have displayed here are strongly recommended for both single and multi-instance of PortX/XpoLog setups.