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Planning Error Log files

One of the first things that IBM Cognos Support will often ask you is to send in the error logs for Contributor when logging an error. What they don’t tell you is where these files can be found and which ones they may want. When you search the drive, you may find multiple copies of the planningerrorlog.csv file located in different directories but no indication of which ones are important.

When Contributor processes request, it actually tries to run under a user context so that security can be respected. Which user it tries to use depends on how the process was initiated. There are two classes of users involved in processing Contributor: the service account (the account of the Cognos services) and the interactive user’s account. When an error occurs, the error is logged to whichever user’s process initiated the request that got the error. When Contributor cannot figure out the user context, then it will use a default location.

Thus, the three locations for the planningerrorlog.csv file are:
C:\Windows\Temp – the default location
As stated, this is the default location when Planning cannot determine the user context. This happens when the service may not be running under an account (set as interactive user), or if things go so horribly wrong that it loses the identity of the executing process. This is not typically the primary planningerrorlog.csv file of interest

C:\Documents and Settings\<service_acct>\Local Settings\Temp – location associated with the service account
This is the location of errors written by the Planning service. This typically comes from when there are job failures from publish, reconciles, etc. Sometimes, you will also see these written here on a webclient failure (like on realtime aggregration).

C:\Documents and Settings\<interactive_user>\Local Settings\Temp – location associated with the interactive user
This is location for errors generated from interactive sessions, like functions in the Contributor Admininstration Console or the interactive portion of the webclient. The interactive user is the logon of the person that is running the console or the webclient.

Which error log do I want?
You may need to scan the log files to figure out which one is relevant. A shortcut to do this is to examine the file modification date to see when it was last updated. In addition, each record in the file is timestamped so that can also be used to determine which file is of interest.

Where to look first:
• If a job failed, then check the service account location first, then windows\temp
• If the Contributor Administration Console had an error, check the interactive user (your account) location first, then windows\temp