How to Export Conversations

Openfire Plugins Community Plugins
1

We recently lost our IT Admin and have not been able to figure out how to export chat conversations from the server for us to review.

Right now, we login to OpenFire Admin Console via the internet browser (utilizing the IP that calls the internal service). The plugins we have installed are ‘Search’, ‘User Import Export’, and ‘JMX Web Plugin’.

Our IT Admin did the exports before, but I am completely lost as to how. The Admin Console does not seem to have any option to do this. I cannot find anywhere that I can find the database file and actually open it up. I believe I have located the database file on the server, but I cannot open it. If he was opening it the software would have already been installed on this server. Can someone help me figure out what to do / where to go to be able to export conversations from spark?

Much Appreciated.

Ryan

2

On Openfire, I’d expect the plugin called ‘monitoring’ to be used to review chat logs. From the sound of it, you don’t have that installed though.

Openfire can be configured to use various types of database systems. If you’re saying that you’ve located a ‘file’, then my best guess is that you’re using the embedded database, which is a HSQLDB database. HSQLDB’s project offers some tools that you can use to interact with that database, but I can’t recommend going down that path unless you’re very familiar with things fit together. If you do, please ensure that you have proper backups.

If you’re using Spark, then chat logs will (also) be stored at the computer that is running Spark. Those logs would only include the messages sent/received by the particular user that is using that machine.

3

Excellent, thank you for your response. That makes sense, my guess is the logs are at the individual’s computers then.

Thanks!

Ryan

4

If these logs are important to you, consider installing the Monitoring plugin!

5

Monitoring is not an available plugin on my lists in the admin console. How would I add that to be available?

Thanks

Ryan

6

Are you on a closed off network? It should automatically be listed.

You can also manually download the plugin from https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/plugins.jsp and upload it in the admin console.

7

Your admin could also have enabled Audit logs, and then chats are stored in the logs directory of the installation folder of Openfire. But they are not easily readable and need some tool to convert them to a proper chat log. Setting can be found in Admin Console > Server Settings > Message Audit Policy. Although Guus’s guess that your admin was just simply copying local chats saved by Spark from machines makes sense too.

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