Who is this article for?

IT Administrators troubleshooting Robot issues.

Pentana App Manager access is required.

The Robot application performs various notification and housekeeping tasks. It writes to a log file and, to keep this file small and manageable, only basic events are logged.

When troubleshooting issues it can be useful to get more information, and this article shows how to change the logging level to enable this.

1. Accessing Robot log

The Robot logs to a text file, normally at C:\Program Files (x86)\Pentana\ServerRobot\PentanaUAT\ServerRobot.txt.

Configuration allows us to set one of five levels of detail, where 0 logs nothing, while 4 provides a detailed commentary of every action the Robot takes.  

Normally we will set the level to 3,  which records start time, self-test results and errors.

During a period of troubleshooting, it might be useful to set the level to 4, which provides timestamps for job entries and exits.

2. Changing Robot logging level

To change the logging level:

1. Open App Manager.
2. Select the correct instance.
3. Switch to the Config tab.
4. Select the Server Robot tab below.
5. Find the <system.diagnostics> section.
6. Go to the AppTraceLevel line.
7. Change value to the required number.
   
   
   
   
8. Click Save.
9. Open the Windows Start menu.
10. Enter services.msc to open the Services app.
11. Locate the Robot service (usually called ServerRobotPentana[instance]).
    

12. Restart the service.

After troubleshooting is complete, we recommend changing the log level back to 3.

Further reading

• Logging and time zones