Diagnostic Provider State Collection Specification

The State Collection spec provides a mechanism for indicating what additional data diagnostic providers in the system should retain in cases where this additional data could be useful for problem determination or application tuning.

In normal operation, most components should work optimally and not store any operational data not needed. There are times, however, when an administrator or automated tool may want a component to collect more information than normal to help in problem determination. This data could then be exposed through a State dump. The State Collection spec was created as a syntax for indicating what additional data the diagnostic providers in the system should retain.

For the syntax of the aCollectionSpec string, refer to the DiagnosticConfigHome API documentation. It is basically a semicolon (;) separated list of collection specification clauses which are of the form:

 <DiagnosticProviderName regexp>:<AttributeId regexp>=[0|1]

Where the DiagnosticProviderName regular expression will make this clause apply to any Diagnostic Provider Name that matches that regular expression. The AttributeId regexp and the boolean value (0 for off, and 1 for on) are stored in the DiagnosticConfig object that each Diagnostic Provider uses. Turning on or off, and processing the clauses left to right allows relatively complex specification. Any spec not explicitly turned on is considered to be off. This format is explained further in the following examples.

To turn on tracing for all attributes in the MyDP Diagnostic Provider:

MyDP:.*=1

To turn on tracing for all attributes of all Diagnostic Providers (this will probably impact system performance):

.*:.*=1

To turn on all tracing for all attributes of all Diagnostic Providers beginning with ConnMgr (for example, Data Sources):

ConnMgr.*:.*=1

This spec turns on special collection attributes in the MyDP Diagnostic Provider that begin with the string PoolInfo. If, however, the attribute begins with PoolInfo.Db2Pool, then the collection is off (because it is read left to right).

MyDP:PoolInfo.*=1;MyDP:PoolInfo.Db2Pool.*=0

It should be noted that State dumps can return important information even in the case where there is no State Collection Specification turned on for a Diagnostic Provider. Diagnostic Providers frequently have to keep some state information in order to operate. Anything in this category is available in a State dump even if there is no special data collection going on. Using the State Collection Specification may increase the amount of data available.

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Related tasks

View the run time state data or configuring the state data collection specifications for a Diagnostic Provider