Many a times we have to capture logs while troubleshooting issues in Dashboard. The server logs may be a little difficult and plus it captures a lot of information. Fiddler is a tool which is easy to understand. Fiddler captures the HTTP traffic on your system.
It provides you with the request sent, the response received, the time required for execution and so on.
You can follow the below link to download Fiddler :
http://www.telerik.com/download/fiddler
The pre-requisite to download fiddler is that you need to have .NET framework installed.
Download Fiddler, Install it and we are good to go.
In case of SSL, go to Tools -> Fiddler options -> HTTPS tab -> check Capture HTTPS CONNECTs.
In order to capture logs for anything (here Dashboards) first launch the Fiddler tool. This is how it would look like :
Later reproduce the error. The logs will be captured in Fiddler. You just need to save it in .saz format. Remember this.
After capturing it would look like this :
Now what exactly would you look into the logs.
On your left side you see the list of sessions captured. It gives information about the Protocol that is being used and the status.
For e.g. . HTTP 200 or HTTP 502 etc.
It also mentions the URL that is executed and to which HOST the request has gone to. Is the session cached and what type of content we have.
Now to see information about each session, select it. The right side displays the information. The upper section is the request and the lower section is the response.
Go to Inspectors -> Raw for seeing the request and response. Right click on the area and select Word wrap. You could also select
View in Notepad. (Instead of RAW you can also use XML)
The request shows all the parameters that were pass to the server. What is the query CUID, the Login and Password, value passed for prompt, cookie information, etc.
We would mostly need the prompt value that is passed. What do we select in the Dashboard and what exactly is passed to the server(the format we select and the format in which the value is passed may be different sometimes). In the below screenshot its an optional prompt so no value.
The response shows us if we got the data or not. (Below is in XML format as it is easy to understand)
Did we get an error. The response mentions the error. Sometimes the Dashboard shows an error but fiddler would give more
information. Is the error same or do we get some other error or any additional error.
Many a times we would see the sessions on left side would be red. This means the request has failed. In such cases check the HTTP status.
When you launch dashboard and crossdomain.xml file is requested but the entry is red, the file was not accessed. The reason could be the gateway and network issue. Also check the Host to which the request has gone and have you placed the crossdomain.xml file there.
The last tab Timeline helps us understand the time required for executing a connection/query. This helps when we have performance issue. We can see where exactly a lot of time is consumed. This can help understand which query takes a lot of time. In below screenshot select all the sessions of which I want to see the execution time.
Now I would share with you when you have different connections the URL will be different. You will know which type of query has executed.
For web service :
For Query browser :
For Live Office :
These are most commonly used connections. You could check for the others.
I have tried to include as much information possible. But you can explore more about the tool.
As Dashboards are being viewed on Mobile we can capture logs for Mobile as well.
Check the below link for the same :
How to trace SAP BI Mobile using Fiddler?
Hpoe this helps !!
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