[Info-vax] OpenVMS Development Annoyances

[IanD]

Master Hoffman, if someone of your skill and expertise around VMS found debugging and tracing root causes of VMS failures at times challenging or probably more to the point, more tedious than it needed to be, then I don't feel quite so stupid! Many a times I was left scratching my head and it was more experience that led me to the root cause than the tools and logs leading the way (That was meant as a compliment to you btw)

ACMS sometimes depicted what you have pointed out before with VMS, a piecemeal approach to logging. A piecemeal approach to a lot of things actually

Process logs, operator logs, home grown application logs, network logs, ACMS logs, swlup logs, accounting logs and others I've probably forgotten about often had to be searched and waded through and collated in some more if itself, usually chronological in an effort to try and put together the sequence of events that led to to the issue.
This is painful, very painful. Did I mention it is painful...

I made a post once before about Windows and it's event logger and it was somewhat shunned because there was 'nothing supposedly wrong' with good old fashioned VMS logging! 
VMS logging and event capture is donkeys years out of date and even the structure of the logging is unstandardized across the multitude of logging mechanisms and utilities and often the best one can do to extract information is to resort to search (assuming the file isn't write locked as well!), the most primitive search selection method possible

To even have something with some of the functionality of the windows event logging mechanism would be good.
I realise there's lots of work to be done with VMS to drag it forward, I just hope a unified standardised logging mechanism is somewhere on the radar or do we just go down the reboot to fix it path and spin up another virtual server and get on with it. I really hope not!