Add activity log to Simple Sync on Mac for diagnostic/trace

Forum Features
1

It would be very helpful if the Simple Sync app on the Mac added a log function to show commands received and action taken.

This would be very helpful when it is performing “hub/controller” functions with the Amazon Echo and Amazon Dot.

If the log file showed commands received from Amazon/Alexa, and then commands issued to defined activities/devices, it would help in resolving whether the problem is with Amazon/Alexa voice recognition understanding the verbal request, whether Simple Control is getting the request from Amazon, and whether Simple Control is issuing the command/control to the actual device.

A rotating log file (one per day) with a maximum time duration to keep logs (months or ??) or a maximum disk space to allocate before re-cycling the logs would solve the problem of burdening the user with log housekeeping or storage overflow problems. In the “set it and forget it” mode, it would simply work and leave a nice log for troubleshooting.

2

The Collect Diagnostics feature activates an extremely high level of logging, more than sufficient to diagnose anything like that. The end result though is not generally user accessible. If you need to figure something out, we can get that logging by using Contact Support.

Meanwhile, this feature request remains reasonable as we could in principle filter that into something user friendly that didn’t require a support round trip.

Thank you.

3

Thanks, Will!

I think some type of end-user log would be useful to help with “self-service” tweaks. There are a lot of small things I have worked out on my own through experimentation and trial-and-error. In the case of Amazon, with the very strict voice syntax, I have had to rename actions and adjust configuration to make it easier. For those changes, a user accessible log would have been very helpful.