Tool for automatically checking the ASE errorlog

Every DBA knows that the ASE errorlog should be checked regularly for error messages or other stuff indicating potential problems. In practice, this isn't done as often as you'd like, because, as a DBA, you have many more urgent things to do than staring at an ASE errorlog every day.
Here is a tool (a shell script) that could make DBA life a little easier: it will check an ASE errorlog for error messages and mail the results to a list of recipients. It is especially useful because of the two following features:

the tool itself will determine the pathname of the ASE errorlog; you don't have to specify this pathname when the server is running.

when searching the ASE errorlog, it will only look at the part of the errorlog since the previous time the tool has been run; this way, you will only see the most recent error messages and you will not see old messages repeated every time.

Here you can download an article (in PDF format) discussing these issues in more detail (this was published in the Q2, 2001 issue of the ISUG Technical Journal).

Update Nov-2006: there is now also a version of this script that can be used to check the errorlog of a Replication Server 15.0 (download below). For more technical background (like how you can make it work for RepServer pre-15 as well) see the November 2006 quiz question.

Installation instructions

ASE errorlog checker: Download here
Replication server errorlog checker: Download here

Save the downloaded file as check_errorlog.sh or check_errorlog_rs.sh.
Then make the file executable with the Unix command chmod +x check_errorlog[_rs].sh

Edit the script to define the variables MAILPROG and DBA_MAIL; MAILPROG must be set to your command-line mail program (like mail, mailx etc.); DBA_MAIL must be set to a list of email adresses to which the results should be sent.

Schedule the script to run regularly as a 'cron' job, so that you'll always find a list of all new error messages in your email every morning.

This tool is a shell script, primarily aimed at a Unix environment. However, this script can also run on Windows, provided a shell emulator (such as CygWin) is used. See the downloaded file for more information about this.

Please refer to the header of the downloaded file for further details.

This document is located at www.sypron.nl/chklog.html

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