Debugging through Log Files

From ServersCheck Wiki

Main Log Files These log files are stored in the logging subdirectory under your main ServersCheck directory.

Alert Log Files These log files are stored in the alerts\logging subdirectory under your main ServersCheck directory.

How to read this log file? When a rule meets the criteria of generating an alert, then the monitoring_rule.exe creates an alert job ticket that is stored in the alerts\queue subdirectory.

The s-alerts.exe continuously scans that directory for new alerts to send out.

A message commonly found in the log file is similar to following: Wed Apr 14 07:38:37 2004 X is DOWN -> Sending SMTP alert to email@domain.com through external ServersCheck mail server Returned: OK

This is allows preceded with a message saying that it could not send the alert through your mail server. ServersCheck allows to send emails through an external SMTP server by using (or not) authentication. If the external server does not respond correctly to the email request or authentication fails, then ServersCheck will try to send the email through our mail server.

To solve this issue, we recommend to use the first option for email alerts: the built-in mail server. Simply make sure that ServersCheck can retrieve the MX record for your mail server in the DNS server it is defined to use.