Crawl / Indexing logging categories

Found yourself in the position of wanting to find out what is going on on the server when you are crawling ?

How about cranking up the logging level ? Nice but if you do it for all , you will rapidly get big log files that will not be so easy to analyze …. Then how about "verbose -ing " the crawl categories? Yes, but which ones?

Well, for your troubleshooting pleasure, here they are :

"MS Search Advanced Tracing"
"IndexerClient"
"IndexerPlugin"
"Arpi"
"GatherStatus "
"GatherSvc "
"GatherDirMon "
"GatherDirMonQ"
"GathererLink "
"GathererSql "
"ScopesCompilation"
"ScopesPlugin "
"SimplePI"
"Common"
"RichErrorReporting"
"PHFile"
"PHSts"
"PHHttp"
"FeatureExtractorPlugin"
"FilterDaemon"
"FTEAdmin"
"FTEAdmin"
"EventLog"
"Exceptions"
"IDXPIEventLog"
"IDXPIFTECursor"
"IDXPIPerfCntr"
"IDXPIPlugin"
"MS Search Indexing"
"MS Search Propagation"

Now you probably will say… yeess go to each one click on the dropdown, select the category, select the level , click ok, re-do all for all the categories.

How can it be accomplished in an easier way ?

Easy :

Stsadm –o setlogginglevel –category <CATEGORY NAME> -tracelevel verbose

Setting back the categories to default values is even simpler :

Stsadm –o setlogginglevel -default

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262191.aspx

For viewing / filtering /analyzing the logs , you can use ULS Viewer https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer

Enjoy