Server process monitoring requires minimal system resources, but you must enable process monitoring for p4 monitor to work. To monitor all active commands, set the monitor configurable as follows:

p4 configure set monitor=1

Additional settings offer more options:

How you set up monitoring levels 5, 10, and 25, depends on the platform where the server is running. See the description of the p4 monitor command in P4 Command Reference for more information.

By default, IDLE processes (often associated with custom applications based on the Perforce API) are not included in the output of p4 monitor. To include idle processes in the default output of p4 monitor, use monitoring level 2.

p4 configure set monitor=2

To display idle processes, use the command:

p4 monitor show -s I

To list the processes monitored by the Perforce server, use the command:

p4 monitor show

To restrict the display to processes currently in the running state, use the command:

p4 monitor show -s R

By default, each line of p4 monitor output looks like this:

pid status owner hh:mm:ss command [args]

where pid is the UNIX process ID (or Windows thread ID), status is R or T depending on whether the process is running or marked for termination, owner is the Perforce user name of the user who invoked the command, hh:mm:ss is the time elapsed since the command was called, and command and args are the command and arguments as received by the Perforce server. For example:

$ p4 monitor show
74612 R qatool     00:00:47 job
78143 R edk        00:00:01 filelog
78207 R p4admin    00:00:00 monitor

To show the arguments with which the command was called, use the -a (arguments) flag:

$ p4 monitor show -a
74612 R qatool     00:00:48 job job004836
78143 R edk        00:00:02 filelog //depot/main/src/proj/file1.c //dep
78208 R p4admin    00:00:00 monitor show -a

To obtain more information about user environment, use the -e flag. The -e flag produces output of the form:

pid client IP-address status owner workspace hh:mm:ss command [args]

where client is the Perforce application (and version string or API protocol level), IP-address is the IP address of the user's Perforce application, and workspace is the name of the calling user's current client workspace setting. For example:

$ p4 monitor show -e
74612 p4/2011.1 192.168.10.2   R qatool    buildenvir 00:00:47 job
78143           192.168.10.4   R edk       eds_elm    00:00:01 filelog
78207 p4/2011.1 192.168.10.10  R p4admin   p4server   00:00:00 monitor

By default, all user names and (if applicable) client workspace names are truncated at 10 characters, and lines are truncated at 80 characters. To disable truncation, use the -l (long-form) option:

$ p4 monitor show -a -l
74612 R qatool     00:00:50 job job004836
78143 R edk        00:00:04 filelog //depot/main/src/proj/file1.c //dep
ot/main/src/proj/file1.mpg
78209 R p4admin    00:00:00 monitor show -a -l

Only Perforce administrators and superusers can use the -a, -l, and -e options.

The server command trace flags and their meanings are as follows.

For command tracing, output appears in the specified log file, showing the date, time, username, IP address, and command for each request processed by the server.

The Perforce Server produces diagnostic output in the server log whenever user commands exceed certain predetermined thresholds of resource usage. Performance tracking is enabled by default, and if P4DEBUG is unset (or the tracking flag is not specified on the command line), the tracking level is computed based on the number of users in the license file.

The precise format of the tracking output is undocumented and subject to change.

You can use the following commands to work with logs.

To enable structured logging, set the serverlog.file.N configurable to the name of the file. Valid names for structured log files and the information logged are shown in the following table.

Files do not have to be set in consecutive order; for example, this is fine:

p4 configure set serverlog.file.1=audit.csv
p4 configure set serverlog.file.2=auth.csv
p4 configure set serverlog.file.4=track.csv

Each of the configured serverlog.file.N files has its own corresponding serverlog.maxmb.N and serverlog.retain.N configurables. For each configured server log type, these configurables control the maximum size (in megabytes) of the logfile before rotation, and the number of rotated server logs retained by the server.

Structured log files are automatically rotated on checkpoint, journal creation, overflow of associated serverlog.maxmb.N limit (if configured), and the p4 logrotate command. You can disable log rotation after journal rotation by setting the configurable dmrotatewithinjnl to 0. Disabling this behavior can help when you're doing frequent journal rotations and you want the log rotated on a different schedule.

You can use the serverlog.counter.N configurable to create a counter that tracks the number of times a structured log file has been rotated. For example, the following command creates a rotation counter called myErrorsCount:

p4 configure set serverlog.counter.3=myErrorsCount

Each time the errors.csv log file is rotated, the counter is increased by one. In addition, the name of the log file is changed to specify the pre-incremented counter value. That is, if the counter myErrors is 7, the errors.csv file is named errors-6.csv.

You can create a counter for each file described in the preceding table. Do not use system reserved counter names for your counter: change, maxCommitChange, job, journal, traits, upgrade.

The p4 logtail command returns the current value of the counter when you logtail that log. It also returns the current size of the log at the end of the output (along with the ending offset in the log). The size and offset are identical if p4 logtail reads to the end of the log. Security monitoring tools can use counters and the p4 logtail command in the process of scanning log files to monitor suspicious activity.