Making your online.log more readable with IDS 11.5

IDS 11.5 comes with a helpful new onconfig parameter which I didn't realize during the closed beta. It is also not mentioned in the New Features section in the releasenotes.

The name of the onconfig paramter is MSG_DATE and the allowed values are 0 (disabled, DEFAULT) and 1 (enabled). It could be dynamically set thru onmode -w[f|m]. If MSG_DATE is enabled, every message written to the online.log will be prefixed with the current date. Take a look at the following examples:

onmode -wf MSG_DATE=0 (disabled, DEFAULT):

16:55:51  Checkpoint Completed:  duration was 0 seconds.
16:55:51  Thu Jul 31 - loguniq 3, logpos 0x5044, timestamp: 0x24f17 Interval: 24
16:55:51  Maximum server connections 1
16:55:51  Checkpoint Statistics - Avg. Txn Block Time 0.000, # Txns blocked 0, Plog used 0, Llog used 1

onmode -wf MSG_DATE=1 (enabled):

07/31/08 16:55:10  Checkpoint Completed:  duration was 0 seconds.
07/31/08 16:55:10  Thu Jul 31 - loguniq 3, logpos 0x4044, timestamp: 0x24f11 Interval: 23
07/31/08 16:55:10  Maximum server connections 1
07/31/08 16:55:10  Checkpoint Statistics - Avg. Txn Block Time 0.000, # Txns blocked 0, Plog used 0, Llog used 1

This little nice enhancements makes your online.log more readable and it could be easier analyzed. However there are two things that I'm missing:

• MSG_DATE should be included in the template file onconfig.std with a short description what it does.
  The onconfig.std has been greatly reworked in IDS 11.5. It describes each parameter and lists it
  inside a logical group of related parameters. MSG_DATE should be part of onconfig.std.
• It would be nice if the DBDATE environment variable would be recognized if MSG_DATE is set. This would make it less
  error-prone for us Europeans to read the date in the online.log.
• And last not least: MSG_DATE should also be recognized when writing messages to the onbar activity log

Anyway, even without that MSG_DATE is a nice little feature enhancement in IDS 11.5.

IDS 11.5 InfoCenter - MSG_DATE Parameter Description