In order to create log files we need a Write File Action. Create a new Write File Action like in the screenshot on the right. The default settings will create daily log files automatically. You may customize the log format by using the custom “File format” option. It is important to have the “Create unique filenames” Option enabled, this will enable the daily written log files.

The log file name for 2008-11-28 would be MonitorWare-2008-11-28.log, and for the next day MonitorWare-2008-11-29.log and so on.

After you configured MonitorWare Agent, you can start the Service and verify that the daily log files are successfully written.

Visit the RarSoft website to download the latest Version of WinRar, if you haven’t installed it already. There are plenty of other packer applications out there and this article may also be used with them. However I will focus on using WinRar.

Once you downloaded WinRar, start it’s installation, and remember the exact path it was installed to. Usually this is “C:\Program Files\WinRAR” or “C:\Program Files (x86)\WinRAR”.

By default the script will create zip files, if you rather want to create rar files, just remove the -afzip parameter from the variable szCommand at the end of the script.

‘ First obtain the correct filename – You may need to modify this section if your filename differes from this sample Dim szWinRardirectory, szBasedirectory, szBaseName, szExtension szWinRardirectory = “c:\Program Files\WinRAR” szBasedirectory = “C:\temp” szBaseName = “MonitorWare” szExtension = “log” ‘Generate Filename Dim dtmYesterday, mYear, mMonth, mDay, szFileName dtmYesterday = date() – 1 mYear = Year(dtmYesterday) mMonth = Month(dtmYesterday) mDay = Day(dtmYesterday) szFileName = szBaseName & “-” & mYear & “-” & mMonth & “-” & mDay & “.” & szExtension ‘Run Archiver Command on the logfile. dim oShell, szCommand set oShell = CreateObject(“Wscript.Shell”) szCommand = “””” & szWinRardirectory & “\winrar.exe”” a -df -ep1 -idp -inul -m3 -afzip “”” & szBasedirectory & “\” & szFileName & “.zip”” “”” & szBasedirectory & “\” & szFileName & “””” ‘DEBUG wscript.echo szCommand Call oshell.run(szCommand,,1)

The next thing to do is to edit this script to your needs. There are 4 parameters at the top which you may need to customize, so the script fits into your environment.

szWinRardirectory – contains the full installation of your WinRar installation
szBasedirectory – Same as the Basedirectory parameter as in your WriteFile action
szBaseName – Same as the BaseName parameter in your WriteFile action.
szExtension – Same as the Extension parameter in your WriteFile action.

Once you have done this, you should run the script at least once manually by double clicking it to see if it works. You may only notice a short popup of the WinRar Windows, depending if a log file to archive can be found, and archiving takes some time. If it works, you should see a zip-packed log file in your logs directory, like in this screenshot.

Open the Control Panel, and go to the scheduled tasks. From there you can create a new scheduled task using a wizard. Once the wizard is opened, click on browse to manually select the “archive_logs.vbs” script. Then proceed to the next step of the wizard.

Choose “Daily”, and set the start time in the next wizard step. I have chosen 02:00 am in this article, but you can also chose 04:00am or 01:00am. It should not be 00:00am, because the script might archive the log file too early.

In the next step you have to configure the Username and Password, the task is going to run under. Once you finished creating the scheduled task, right click it in the task list and select “Run” in order to test that the task is working.