Monitoring Your Drupal Website Using Watchdog

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The watchdog module monitors your website, capturing system events in a log. The watchdog log is simply a list of recorded events containing usage data, performance data, errors, warnings and operational information.
It is important to check the watchdog report on a regular basis as it is often the only way to tell what is going on.
To access the watchdog logs, you must be assigned the access administration pages permission.
The watchdog logs are not intended to replace a web statistics program, instead they tell you how your Drupal system is functioning.

Examining The Available Logs

To view the watchdog logs, navigate to:
http://<website>/admin/logs
Log messages are listed in reverse chronological order and display: message type, date, username (if not know will display anonymous), and if available operations which may be viewing more of the message detail, viewing the actual node or action performed by the user.
Logs are grouped by message type. The following groups are available:
  • all messages: displays all messages
  • access denied messages: displays all messages where a users has attempted to perform an action or access a page which they are not authorised
  • content messages: displays all messages for node updates, additions and deletions
  • cron messages: displays all messages for when the internal cron task has been executed
  • file system messages: displays all errors messages relating to file system operations
  • menu messages: displays all messages for menu updates, additions and deletions
  • page not found messages: displays all messages for when a page could not be found and shows the link being referenced
  • php messages: displays all PHP code execution errors
  • user messages: displays all session opened (login) and session closed (logout) events on a per user basis
  • search messages: displays all search queries submitted to the website, the search keyword used and the search results