Free NX Log Analyzer from HP
Through years of experience working with UGS, Hewlett-Packard has produced several free tools which have been made available to NX™ software users running on HP® personal workstations. The tools aid with system administration tasks, such as identifying and installing NX certified graphics drivers, tuning NX for best graphics performance, monitoring NX memory usage, and filtering interesting data from NX log files. This final feature is provided by the NX Log Analyzer, which has been recently enhanced. The NX Log Analyzer reports important information from the NX syslog that can be helpful when diagnosing NX problems or inspecting NX customize settings.
Each time NX is run on a workstation, it creates a syslog file where it can record configurations and keystroke translations. If the NX run is successful, the syslog file is automatically deleted. However if NX crashes or has a significant error, the syslog file will be left in the UGII_TEMP_DIR directory with a filename that starts with your username, and ends with the extension .syslog.
While the default is to remove the syslog upon a clean exit of NX, there are situations where you may want to review the contents of the log. To save the log for analysis, you may either:
- Set the environment variable UGII_KEEP_SYSTEM_LOG to “yes”, or
- While in NX, go to Help-NX Log File, and in the information window, select File-Save as to save the file with a descriptive name.
The NX syslog file captures a lot of valuable information. However, the file is often large and difficult to read. To ease this task, The NX Log Analyzer reads in an NX syslog file and extracts the important information. It reports graphics hardware acceleration and part file load options. It is also capable of detecting a large set of errors and tracebacks, and, if possible, categorizing and diagnosing each error.
The analysis information may also be useful for comparing two syslog files for customization differences, even when an error hasn’t occurred. Often two systems are believed to be configured identically, but due to NX customization, they perform very differently. The syslog analyzer uses color-coded markings for easy side-by-side comparison of common customizations that can drastically impact performance, such as part file load options.
The NX Log Analyzer is free of charge from Hewlett-Packard. It is included as part of the HP Performance Tuning Framework, which ships preinstalled on Windows-based HP personal workstations, or it may be downloaded from http://www.hp.com/go/framework.
