Enfocus Community

Dear Switch users,

I recently started working on a new user experience (UX) for Switch, and I would like you all to join in.
Without your input and help this process would be useless.

On this forum I would like to:

• post questions, ideas, prototype mockups and such to pick your brains and see where we can make your life and daily work easier, more pleasant, better.

• read all your comments, ideas, problems, stuggles, … you have with Switch and would like to share with us.

So here’s my first question:
Do you use the Switch Messages search filters? And if you do, can you list the kind of filters you have and use today?

Thanks a lot for the help,
Wim Deliveyne
User Experience Design Engineer
Enfocus

Yes.

Filters I use in the messages are:
- Enable debug and assert messages in the type column
- Show only the error messages to see what kind of things went wrong recently
- I do various combinations of filtering on unique prefix and job name to follow the "path" a job took thru the flow to find out what went wrong with a job. This can be tricky because a job can split in two in a Switch flow, which gives one copy a new unique prefix. And the name can also change for flow logic reasons.

Some related things which might be useful:
- It would be awesome if Switch would be able to only log debug messages for a specific flow or even a specific element. Then there would be far less clutter in the messages if you have to debug only one specific thing in your Switch

I use filters mostly to see what went wrong with a specific job. Sometimes I filter on a specific flow to see what is going on in that flow.

Unfortunately with 50+ flows running and lots of jobs the last 1000 messages is fairly useless as it most of the time only lets me see what has happened the last hour...
Is there a way to select what is logged in messages? If you could choose between info, warnings and errors the messages log would be much more useful to me.

Edit:
I noticed you can filter the messages to only show errors and doing that shows me the last two days error messages, which is good... Live and learn...

I use filters all the time.
They are very helpful and messages would be almost useless without them.
I also noticed that default 24 hours or so (can not remember exact default) is nowhere near enough, but if you retain logs for long time, filtering and viewing becomes really slow.

I changed default to 192 hours (8 days) since some flows I have are done on a weekly basis and I like to compare sometimes to previous week.

Filters in use all the time:
-no info, no warning
Occasionally:
-debug and assert
-name of the flow, date range, etc...

Maybe being able to load exported csv messages in the messages viewer would be useful. This way we can check old messages without having to keep them in the database itself.

I'm also using the messages quite often but they work very slow which is the main problem even though the messages are kept for "only" 24 hours.