Redesigned log file rotation in SmartInspect 3.0

The current SmartInspect version already comes with options to rotate log files. Rotating log files and archiving logs is useful to keep the size of individual log files small and to limit the amount of disk space your log files consume. SmartInspect 3.0 introduces a completely redesigned log rotation feature to make it more flexible and useful. The following options are available:

Rotation by date/time
You can configure SmartInspect to generate new log files periodically. This allows you to rotate log files by hour, day, week and so on. This is especially useful for server systems where a steady stream of log entries and messages are generated. Log rotation by date makes it also very easy to use log files for auditing purposes because you know exactly what time frame a log covers (the log file names contain time stamps). New in SmartInspect 3.0 is the option to specify how many log files SmartInspect should manage. Limiting the amount of log files is a great way to keep disks clean of old log files.

Rotation by size
Similar to rotating log files by date and time, SmartInspect offers you the option to rotate log files by size. If you need to keep individual log files small (to make it easier to email them, for example), you can easily specify that SmartInspect should start a new log file once the current log reaches a certain size. SmartInspect 2.0 only allowed you to rotate between 2 log files when this option was used. This limitation is now gone and you can freely configure how many files SmartInspect should generate (5 files of 10MB, unlimited files of 1MB and so on).

Combining log rotation options
You can now also combine both log rotation options. You can thus specify a maximum log file size and also tell SmartInspect to rotate log files at least once per time period. SmartInspect enforces the limitation that it first encounters and automatically rotates the log files and appends the current time stamp to the new log file name.

Thanks for reading our small series on new SmartInspect 3.0 features! We are planning to officially release SmartInspect 3.0 on August 12, but chances are good that the final version will be available on our customer portal a few days earlier.