How to Use Engine Logs

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How to Use Engine Logs

Engine logs are captures of your Results Window and so much more.  They can be profoundly useful for troubleshooting, but you have to know how to enable them and how to use them.
 

Prerequisites

 

• Alteryx Designer or Alteryx Server
  • All versions
• Notepad++ (Optional)

 

Procedure

Enable 

Engine logging is not enabled by default, so if you want to use engine logs, you'll need to enable them.   The article entitled How to Enable Engine Logs shows how to do that.

Disable 

If you decide to disable engine logging, you can clear the path from the Logging Directory box and save the changed configuration.

Using the Engine Logs

1. Engine logs are named with a number that represents the epoch time when the workflow began.
2. You will not be able to open the log until the workflow completes.
3. They are just like the Results Window for a Desktop Designer workflow run except that they also have a chronology stamp.  The stamp shows the time elapsed since the workflow run began until the message writes to the internal log.
4. Engine logs often contain more information than is displayed in the Results section of a Gallery run.
5. The text file is not color-coded like the Results Window, so Warnings and Errors are explicitly written.
6. If you are troubleshooting an app or a macro and you enable Workflow Configuration > Runtime > Show All Macro Messages before you start the run, those messages will all be captured in the engine log.  (Recall that the results will occupy a lot of space with that option enabled, so you'll want to disable it for production.)
7. If you are optimizing a workflow (including apps or macros) and you enable Workflow Configuration > Runtime > Enable Performance Profiling, that information will be captured in the engine log.  (Recall that the workflow will run more slowly with that option enabled, so you'll want to disable it for production.)
8. The timestamp at the top of the log will show the local time when the workflow began running.

Example

1. Alteryx_Log_1644016661_01.log shows the information for an analytic app that began running at UTC Friday, February 4, 2022 11:17:41 PM  (4:17 pm MST)
2. The log shows the app or workflow that was running and the time it started (local)image.png
3. The "WorkflowId" is a unique identifier that is utilized in product telemetry and is of no value to users.
4. The "RunId" is a unique identifier that corresponds to the "WorkflowRunGuid" tag in the Service log. This allows you to match a workflow invocation captured in the Service log to the same workflow run's Engine log.
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5. Each message shows the tool and some information about what it did.  Some tools do not generate any messages.image.png
6. If you have the workflow that generated the log, you can CTRL+F to find each tool by ToolID.  When you click on a tool, it is selected in the workflow.image.png
7. The log shows how many times macros ran. image.png
8. You can use CTRL+F in an editor like Notepad++ to easily determine more information about the run.image.png

Common Issues

The Logs Are Not Automatically Removed

As noted above, there is no cleanup operation that removes the logs, so they will eventually take up disk space wherever they are stored.

Additional Resources

• How to Enable Engine Logs
• Help: Types of Log Files