How to gather clean server logs for troubleshooting Revit Server

Autodesk Support

Oct 8, 2023

Products and versions covered

Issue:

How to gather clean server logs for troubleshooting Revit Server.

Causes:

Revit Server logs provide information on what is occurring on the server, and when combined with Revit journals can help in tracking down unexpected behavior.

However, as there is a lot of data recorded by Revit Server through normal operations it can be important to limit the amount of data that which captures the error condition.

Solution:

There are two approaches to get clean log files, and depending on the type of issue you are encountering and your Revit Server usage one may be better than the other:

Approach 1: Delete existing logs and reproduce issue.
  1. Lock the server so that there are no in flight operations processing when making these changes
    1. Open Revit Server Administrator.
    2. Select the server name.
    3. Click the Lock Icon (or press Shift + Ctrl + L).
    4. Click the Lock button from the warning pop-up.
    5. Wait for the lock icon to be displayed next to the server name (within Revit Server Administrator).
  2. Stop the Revit Server application:
    1. From the server open IIS Manager (Microsoft link).
    2. In the Connections pane (on the left) browse to the Application Pools.
    3. Select the RevitServerAppPool%Version% (where %Version% is replaced with the Revit Server version) and click Stop on the Actions pane (on the right).
    4. Open the Services Control Panel (Microsoft link).
    5. Find, and stop Revit Server AutoSync %Version% service.
  3. Clear the existing log files.
    1. Browse to the folder: C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Revit Server %Version%\Logs
    2. Move all of the files within this folder to another location (this keeps the logs available in case you want to review them, but forces Revit Server to create new logs when it is restarted.)
  4. Restart Revit Server.
    1. Go back to the RevitServerAppPool%Version% and start it.
    2. Start the Revit Server AutoSync %Version% service.
  5. Go through the steps necessary to reproduce the behavior you are trying to troubleshoot.
  6. Go back to the C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Revit Server %Version%\Logs folder, and copy these files to another location (this is important to get a copy of the log just after the issue is reproduced, before additional unrelated information is recorded in the logs).

Approach 2: Capture entire log (containing error condition) and pare down to just the time covered by the Revit journal (recording the issue).
  1. Get a journal recorded when the issue occurs.
  2. Note the time when the journal starts, and when it ends (this is the timeframe that we want to look at from the server log).
  3. On the host server, browse to the folder: C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Revit Server %Version%\Logs
  4. Create a copy of all the files from the Logs folder
  5. Open the ModelService.log file (note that the extension is LOG and not SVCLOG or a number) (Wordpad is a good editor available by default in Windows that can open large files.)
  6. Using the timestamp on each line, find the first line which is close (the same hour / minute would be close enough) to the start time you identified in the journal, and then delete everything above this line.
  7. Next, find the last line which is close to the end time you identified in the journal, and then delete everything after this line.
  8. Save the file with a new name e.g. ModelServiceAbb.log
  9. If working through an accelerator, go through steps 3-8 on the accelerator but replacing ModelService.log with LocalService.log (the LocalService.log is the one that records accelerator activity).
Note: If you will be e-mailing these logs to someone, ZIP up the entire folder before sending, as this creates a single file, and the compression process will significantly reduce the size of the text files.

Products:

Revit;

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