INTEGRATING THE EPICS IOC LOG INTO THE CSS MESSAGE LOG
Elena Danilova · 2011
The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) includes the “IOCLogServer”, a tool that logs error messages from front-end computers (Input/Output Controllers, IOCs) into a set of text files. Control System Studio (CSS) includes a distributed message logging system with relational database persistence and various log analysis tools. We implemented a log server that forwards IOC messages to the CSS log database, allowing several ways of monitoring and analyzing the IOC error messages. EPICS IOC LOG The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) front-end computers, commonly referred to as Input/Output Controllers (IOCs), supports a simple TCP-based logging system. IOCs connect to the “IOCLogServer”, by default on TCP port 6500, and send basic text messages. A new line character terminates each text message. The IOCLogServer annotates each message with the current time/date and the IP address of the IOC, and then writes them to a rotating set of text files [1]. This logging mechanism has proven to be very robust, but it lacks tools to analyze the log messages. Use of the IOC log at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) was limited to a post-mortem search for clues in case of IOC problems, based on UNIX command-line text tools like “grep” or directly reading the log files in a text editor. CSS LOG