The IT Search application has a build in error handler. Of course it was designed to handle most errors automatically. In most cases there still might be a log entry about an error or issue that was detected. This does not mean it did not work right, due to the fact that some issues might be more informal while other might mean a real error occurred.
If the there are errors, you will see them in a table. If there aren’t any current error log entries, the table will not appear.
To keep the database behind slim and fast, errors are only kept for the same day respective past 24 hours and the amount of errors you see by default is limited to 50 in the configuration.
Note: Errors are not really purged on a daily basis. What actually happens is that they are persistent for the last day an error was reported. If you see and weeks old error message in the log it only means that no further errors since have been reported and the log was therefor not purged. The purging happens when a new error occurs, this will cause the log procedure to remove all entries that aren’t from today. As long this does not happen, the last day with errors will remain.
One issue stood out to me while developing the application, namely SIDs that can’t be resolved.
If a directory or file has an ACL (access list) SID attached that can’t be resolved, it certainly will be reported in the error log. The SID it self and the directory or file where it was detected will be reported. This is no actual issue for the application it self, rather then informing you that there seems to be an issue with the NTFS permissions due to an e.g. GROUP entry that does not exist anymore or might be related to an Active Directory domain that is not accessible so that the SID can’t be resolved. This eventually just means that the application will not obey any group membership of the SID cause it can’t access the group, it therefor will be ignored.
In any case, you might wanna investigate such issues and correct them, cause they could possibly mean an issue within the NTFS ACLs or your Active Directory structure, or just be old entries that you might wanna remove. The IT-Admins Tool can help you with this task as well.
In general – please note that just because there is entries in the error log it does not mean that there is something bad going on. In order to help debugging real issues and seeing the big picture, the application writes very proactive to this logfile. While it does that, there is no difference made between informational entries, warnings and real issues. Most events you would see in here are automatically accounted for already and they merely are important for debugging reasons. As long you don’t see wrong search results, a not working search etc. while accessing the search, you shouldn’t worry to much about it. Of course, always feel free to contact me with any questions and comments.