Our website requires you install or enable flash player for full experience, you can download flash player by clicking here.
Make sure you also have javascript enabled so that flash player & menus work correctly.

Get Adobe Flash player

What would you like to monitor?

For when WebSpyrians have something to say.

Posts Tagged ‘MSDE’

Microsoft TMG SQL to Text Script

Friday, June 29th, 2012

Microsoft Forefront TMG logs activity to it’s internal SQL Express database. In addition to the extra steps you need to perform to access this database from a remote server, importing data into Vantage is much slower than importing from W3C Text logs.

You can easily change the logging from SQL Express to W3C text logs in TMG’s logging options. However, TMG relies on the SQL Express database for it’s own reporting. Of course, we argue that Vantage more than replaces TMG’s default reporting, however it’s understandable that you don’t necessarily want to ‘loose’ a feature of TMG in order to gain faster log imports in WebSpy Vantage.

But, with a little effort, you can in fact have the best of both worlds.

If you do not want to change your default logging you can utilize this MSDE To Text script to convert your TMG SQL databases into W3C formatted text files which can be easily imported into Vantage.


Watch your TMG’s waist line. Switch log format and reduce fat now!

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

We often recommend customers using Microsoft ISA or TMG switch their logging to W3C text file, in order to get the best possible import speed, and also because the text logs are much easier to access from a remote machine (see my previous article on accessing TMG’s SQL Express Log database). Logging to the default MSDE or SQL Express databases also requires more resources in terms of processor utilization, memory consumption and disk I/O.

But there is another advantage to switching to text. They take up considerably less disk space. Here are some figures:

(more…)


Convert Microsoft ISA 2006 MSDE logs to WebSpy compatible text logs

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Some customers have experienced issues converting their ISA MSDE logs to text using Microsoft’s MSDEToText.vbs script for ISA 2006 (available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=23531736-942f-466c-acb3-861a899d37b4&displaylang=en)

If you convert your logs to text using this script, they won’t import into WebSpy Vantage or Analyzer due to an extra line break in the header of the file (after #fields:).

We’ve therefore created a modified version of the script that creates compatible log files for WebSpy software.

Download the modified MSDEToText script:
MSDEToText.zip -26 KB

Also make sure the file names of your output log files contain the word WEB (for Web Proxy logs) or FWS (for Firewall Logs) as Analyzer and Vantage use these strings to automatically detect the type of ISA log file.

Happy converting!