Operation and Packet Dumping

Tracking the requests and responses that move through your network can be exceedingly helpful when trying to make sense of the various operations that are taking place within your infrastructure. Whether for debugging and performance tweaking, or for auditing and security purposes, powerful logging tools that can provide detailed information about each transaction are an important component within any identity handling environment.

Operation and Packet Dumping

Symlabs Virtual Directory Server and LDAP Proxy are both bundled with logging plugins that are perfect for this sort of task. Depending on the level of detail that you require within your log output, you can take advantage of the Operation Dumper plugin or the Packet Dumper plugin.

The Operation Dumper plugin was designed to be used as an all-purpose logging facility that could help both in debugging errors and in tracing usage of the platform. This plugin works by logging every operation (both requests and responses) processed by the core engine of the Virtual Directory. Each operation is logged as a single line entry, containing several fields delimited by a pipe ( | ) character. Configuration options are provided to allow a customer to determine how the logged output should be stored, so that output can easily be processed by a log rotation facility.

The Packet Dumper plugin is naturally more verbose than the Operation Dmper. It is designed to work in a similar way to the Operation Dumper plugin, but instead of logging one line per operation, it logs multiple lines for each packet that passes through the stage in which the plugin is installed, providing full detail of the content of every packet moving through your infrastructure. The most common use for this plugin is to debug package contents as they move between client applications and backend repositories. This can help with development and performance tweaking during the development phase of a project.

Both plugins offer five different log output options and can be configured to only log 'read' or 'write' operations, or to log both.

Benefits

Realistically, these plugins are designed to be used in environments that are already considering deploying a Virtual Directory to resolve some other issue. These logging plugins provide the added benefit of being able to track the type of transactions that make the biggest impact on your infrastructure and help you to develop the best possible solution within your environment.

Since the Packet Dumper log output contains all of the data used within a transaction, it is perfectly feasible to use output from this plugin to replay transactions on a replicated system in order to ensure that two systems are perfectly synchronized.