Monitor your sites – Watch your logs

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:00:07 +0000

I manage a few servers dedicated solely to my affiliate marketing efforts. As part of my daily routine, I monitor logs and activity of those servers. I do this for to maintain a level of security, but I also do this to keep an eye out for issues related to my affiliate sites.

Today for example, I started seeing ‘Warnings’ about undefined variables related to a eBay API processing script. This variable is defined when the server successfully communicated with eBay’s API and it then fills a array. The array was never created, yet, there were no errors with the API communication? This was odd, so I started to do some debugging.

I ‘echoed’ the response and saw the following:

object(SimpleXMLElement)[1]
public ‘Timestamp’ => string ‘2009-07-12T15:21:46.575Z’ (length=24)
public ‘Ack’ => string ‘Failure’ (length=7)
public ‘Errors’ =>
object(SimpleXMLElement)[2]
public ‘ShortMessage’ => string ‘Auth token is hard expired.’ (length=27)
public ‘LongMessage’ => string ‘Auth token is hard expired, User needs to generate a new token for this application.’ (length=84)
public ‘ErrorCode’ => string ‘932′ (length=3)
public ‘SeverityCode’ => string ‘Error’ (length=5)
public ‘ErrorClassification’ => string ‘RequestError’ (length=12)
public ‘Version’ => string ‘623′ (length=3)
public ‘Build’ => string ‘e623__Bundled_9520957_R1′ (length=24)
public ‘HasMoreItems’ => string ‘false’ (length=5)

Ah, so my authToken had expired. I didn’t even know they expired. Logging into eBay’s developer area, I saw that the token expired yesterday (7/11). The bottom line, is that I have many sites communicating to eBay using the API system there, and if I didn’t monitor my logs, I would have missed this. I’ll be re-writing my API function to alert on Ack=failure to avoid this. Normally, I was just looking at ‘complete’ failure in the communication string.

Money-Code » server

Monitor your sites – Watch your logs