Logging & Troubleshooting

CrashFix is a complex system and its successful work depends on many factors, like file integrity, file and directory permissions, PHP configuration, free disk space, availability of required PHP extensions, correctness of incoming data and so on. Any of those factors may introduce unexpected issues, and CrashFix provides several troubleshooting tools for resolving those issues.

Note: The Frequently Asked Questions page also contains some questions and answers related to troubleshooting.

Logging

Logging is the main way for investigating problems. CrashFix web application and service components create and maintain several text log files that may contain information useful for troubleshooting installation and configuration issues.

CrashFix web application creates the following log files:

DOCUMENT_ROOT/crashfix/protected/runtime/application.log

The file above is used for writing information about PHP warnings and errors occurring in CrashFix web application when it is being accessed by CrashFix users. For example, if a PHP error happens when a user tries to open some CrashFix page in his/her web browser, the error information is written here.

DOCUMENT_ROOT/crashfix/protected/runtime/console.log

The file above is used for writing information about PHP warnings and errors occurring in CrashFix web application during communication with CrashFix service. For example, if an error occurs when an incoming crash report is being processed, the error information is written to this file.

CrashFix service creates the following log files (in Windows):

C:\Program Files (x86)\CrashFix\logs\monitor.log
C:\Program Files (x86)\CrashFix\logs\error.log

and the following log files in Linux:

/var/log/crashfix/monitor.log
/var/log/crashfix/error.log

The monitor.log file contains messages from CrashFix monitoring process, while the error.log contains messages from the service itself.

Verbose Error Messages

When a PHP error occurs on some CrashFix page, the short error message is printed to web browser screen. By default, CrashFix error messages are as short as possible. This is done to not expose details of internal logics to end users, thus making the system more secure.

Note: Although the error messages are short, the administrator is able to recover full error information (including the stack trace) from application.log file mentioned above.

However, sometimes it may be required to enable verbose PHP error messages for debugging purposes (this is strongly not recommended to do in production systems). The administrator is able to enable verbose PHP errors by defining CRASHFIX_WEBAPP_DEBUG PHP environment variable in php.ini configuration file:

SetEnv CRASHFIX_WEBAPP_DEBUG 1

Further reading: Daily Usage