Table of Contents

Logging

The Logging settings are used to control logging-related settings, specifically:

  • Log retention policies
  • Log levels

Both of these settings are operational features designed to keep your solution performant, stable, and maintainable over time.

For example, without automatic log deletion configured, the logs that DynamicWeb are continually producing will grow indefinitely. This does not usually cause immediate problems on a healthy system - but over weeks and months it will impact performance, storage costs, and operational clarity. On an unhealthy solution which produces logs at a higher rate the impact is even more noticeable.

Log retention lets you strike a balance between:

  • Keeping enough history to troubleshoot issues
  • Avoiding unnecessary load on the database and file system
  • Preventing disk exhaustion or oversized log tables

It is not a replacement for fixing errors - just a way to ensure that unresolved issues do not silently degrade the system.

Tip

You should think of logs as signals and not archives. Logs are mostly valuable when they are recent, relevant, and actionable. Keeping months or years of logs rarely improves troubleshooting - in fact it often makes it worse.

Only keep logs if they're:

  • Required for compliance reasons
  • Required for auditing
  • Exported to an external logging system

In most normal cases, a short retention period is better - and we recommend that log retention policies are enabled by default.

Log retention

The Log retention settings control how long DynamicWeb stores log data and when old log entries are automatically deleted.

Log retention

To enable automatic log deletion:

  1. Navigate to Settings > System > Log Retention
  2. Check Delete logs automatically
  3. Set a retention period for:
    • File logs (application and system log files written to disk)
    • Database logs (logged system events store in the database, usually available using the Event viewer)
  4. Save

Deletion runs automatically as a scheduled task and removes entries older than the configured retention period.

Once you have enabled automatic log deletion, you should monitor the system and adjust values based on:

  • Traffic volume
  • Integration activity frequency
  • Error frequency
  • Other operational requirements

Retention settings should also be reviewed as a part of a go-live checklist, performance review, incident postmortems, and general system health reviews.

You can also access logs using the event viewer

These are general best practices, adjust based on real-world usage:

  • Low Traffic/Simple solution
    • Files: 14–30 days
    • Database logs: 14 days
  • Medium Traffic/Typical B2B solution
    • Files: 7–14 days
    • Database logs: 7–14 days
  • High Traffic/Integration heavy
    • Files: 3–7 days
    • Database logs: 3–7 days

For special cases where there are compliance or auditing requirements:

  • Export logs to external systems
  • Keep shorter retention in DynamicWeb itself

Log level

The Log level settings are used to configure the minimum level of event being logged by the system. Log level

The log level hierarchy is:

  1. Trace
  2. Debug
  3. Warning
  4. Error
  5. Fatal
  6. Off

If Off is selected, no events are logged - with Trace almost everything is logged. We recommend that you use Trace and Debug only during test, and switch to Warning or Error on a production setup, only reenabling more extensive event logging if you're chasing performance ossues or other errors.

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