Monitoring recipe activity is an important way to confirm that recipes are working and what triggers and actions have and haven’t completed. Uncanny Automator offers 3 logging tools: Recipe logs, Trigger logs and Action logs.
Recipe logs
The Recipe log shows the overall progress of each recipe run, so it considers all triggers and actions in each recipe. Entries in this log are generally either “In progress”, where perhaps some but not triggers have been satisfied, or “Completed”, where trigger conditions are met and the actions have run successfully. This is a useful view for seeing activity status at a glance, but to dig deeper, use the Details button for a row to see more information about triggers and actions associated with a particular recipe run.
Trigger Logs
The Trigger log, as its name suggests, is a detailed record of every trigger for every recipe that has been tracked on the site. This is effectively an overview of all user and webhook activity on the site associated with recipes.
Action Logs
The Action log shows everything that has happened on the site as a result of recipes that have run. This log is invaluable for tracing issues when recipes don’t run as expected, and if there are errors when executing recipes, this is where you can find out more details. The Notes column will help here, and might show errors like a user being missing, a Slack channel no longer existing, etc.
Another important part of the Action log is that it shows what actions are scheduled but haven’t yet run, and if they haven’t yet run, they can be cancelled from this log. See below for a screenshot of how to cancel a scheduled action from the Action log.
Cleaning up the Logs
Log entries typically take up very little space and don’t affect normal Automator performance, but certainly it makes sense to remove log entries that are no longer needed. Once recipes have been completed, after a certain amount of time you may decide that you want to purge those records.
Users of the free version of Uncanny Automator can use the log pruning tool under Automator > Settings >Data management in /wp-admin/ to manually remove older long entries for recipes that have completed (successfully or unsuccessfully), dlete records when users are deleted, or automatically delete entries as recipes are completed.
For users of our Pro version, there is an additional automatic pruning option available so that you can clear older, unnecessary records after the number of days that you set.
It’s also possible to prune logs using WP-CLI using this command:
wp automator prune –help
Delete all Automator records
If you plan to uninstall and remove Automator plugins from your site, set the switch below to Enabled, then deactivate and delete Automator. Please note that this will remove all Automator records and they cannot be restored.
