Console Logs

Console Logs captures internal debug messages from a Director or Cluster. Use it to observe component activity, diagnose connectivity, and verify operational status without reaching for server-side log files.

Like Live Data, a capture is a bounded session rather than a continuous tail: you set a duration, an event limit, and the severities you care about, then read the results as a searchable table.

Console Logs is available on Director and Cluster detail pages only.

Accessing Console Logs

Navigate to Fleet Management > Directors and select a Director to open its detail view, then open the Console logs tab. For Clusters, select a Cluster from the Clusters tab of the same page; the Cluster detail view offers the same tab.

Running a Capture

With nothing captured yet, the tab shows an empty state and a Capture console logs button. Clicking it opens the Capture console logs dialog:

Setting	Notes
Severity level	Which severities to collect — at least one is required
Capture time in seconds	5 to 60; defaults to 60
Capture up to N events	100 to 5,000; defaults to 1,000
Filters (Optional)	Restricts the capture to messages containing this text
Mask sensitive data	Replaces sensitive values with placeholders before the records reach the browser. On by default. See Masked Captures

Click Start capture. While the session runs, a status bar reports that it is capturing and breaks the running total down by severity; Capture settings in that bar shows the configuration in use.

When the console is served over HTTPS or from localhost, a capture is encrypted for the browser that starts it, as in Live Data, and only that browser can open it. A current Director encrypts each message itself, where it captures it, so nothing between the Director and the browser can read it, the platform included; the platform encrypts the messages of an older Director where they enter the platform. The status bar shows the same indicator:

Status bar	When
A lock and End-to-end encrypted, with an information button	Every record so far was encrypted by the Director that captured it, under a key the console verified
A lock and Encrypted between the platform and your browser	Every record so far arrived encrypted, and the platform encrypted at least one of them
A warning icon and Some records weren't encrypted	At least one record arrived unencrypted. The record is still shown

The information button, Show the director keys, lists each Director's key fingerprint, to compare with the one the Director writes to its log when it starts. Checking a Director's Key in Live Data describes the check.

Nothing is shown when the browser cannot encrypt, because the console is served over plain HTTP from an address other than localhost; the capture then works as before, unencrypted. The indicator clears with the rows on Clean.

Console log captures are masked as live data captures are, with the same switch, the same rules and the same status bar indicator: Sensitive data masked, or a warning icon and Sensitive data not masked. A role without the unmasked view always gets them masked. See Masked Captures.

A capture stops when its time elapses, when it reaches its event limit, or when you stop it — whichever comes first.

The Directors mark when the capture started and when it completed. These markers are not shown as rows in the table and are not counted in the event totals.

If the connection drops or the server fails the capture, the status bar says so and asks you to start a new one.

Severity Levels

Level	Description
Error	Failures requiring attention — connection errors, authentication failures, service exceptions
Warning	Conditions that may indicate problems — resource thresholds, deprecated configurations, retry attempts
Info	Normal operational messages — service startup, configuration loaded, connections established
Debug	Detailed diagnostic output — request and response traces, internal state changes, processing steps
Verbose	The most detailed output the component emits

note

A capture starts with Error, Warning, and Info selected. Debug and Verbose are deselected deliberately: both are high-volume on a busy Director, and a capture that opened with them enabled would spend its event budget before you had a chance to narrow it.

The Results Table

Captured messages appear as a table:

Column	Contents
Date	When the message was emitted
Entry type	Its severity
Source	The component that produced it
Message	The message text

Source falls back through what the record actually carries: the producing component if named, otherwise the Director, otherwise the Director's identifier, otherwise the subsystem. This is what attributes a line in a cluster capture, where messages arrive from several Directors at once.

Searching and Exporting

Search logs filters the captured rows as you type — over what has already been captured, not over what the running session collects. The capture dialog's Filters field does the latter.

Control	Effect
Copy	Copies the captured output to the clipboard
Download	Saves the capture as CSV, JSON, or ZIP
Clean	Clears the results. The status bar stays, with the last capture's settings and its Capture button, so the next capture is one click away

An exported file carries both the displayed date and the original wire timestamp. If a search term or a severity selection was active when you exported, the file records it along with the filtered and total counts, so a partial export cannot be mistaken for a complete one.

Prerequisites

Console Logs requires the Director or Cluster to be both enabled and connected. When either condition is not met, the tab explains which:

• Director or Cluster is disabled — enable the component from the Directors management page
• Director or Cluster is not connected — verify the Director service is running and reachable

Permissions

Viewing the Console logs tab requires the console-log read permission. Seeing a capture unmasked also requires the unmasked view (LIVEDATA_READ_UNMASKED), the same permission as for live data. Without it, every console log capture is masked. See Roles.

---