When checking logs via System → Diagnostics → Logs, I saw some error messages yesterday that I wanted to investigate further today. To my surprise, those log entries were no longer available.
The message “These are the last lines of the logs for services involved in this app” should have rung a bell in the first place, but it didn’t. Maybe the sentence “These are the last X lines of the logs …” would have 
This brings me to the question: “Can I even check the whole log?” I know I can use sudo journalctl -u plinth from the terminal, but maybe that’s not for the ‘regular person’ who only uses Plinth. It could be mentioned in the text, or maybe there could be a button that generates a downloadable text file?
Since the default on my system is to keep the log in RAM, it would be nice to signal the admin that there is a “write to disk” option, which is needed to see logs from before a reboot. A link to the Configuration page would be helpful here.
At the Configuration page, it would also be nice to have a warning that in Plinth (some/all?) logs only show part of the log.
Finally, the manual could describe in more detail how to handle the stored log files.
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In addition to the former post, based on trying to analyze the logs, and maybe to help the ‘regular user’:
In System there are logs for Plinth and Freedombox Privileged. The first time I saw these, didn’t have a clue what this was all about, maybe some text could clarify?
-
Plinth: The application that runs the FreedomBox web interface. Logs contain messages like user logins, configuration changes, diagnostic results, and errors in the web application
-
FreedomBox Privileged: System-level changes?
The logs shown in the System interface are the most severe messages. To see more detailed information, you can use Cockpit and adjust the severity level filter from ‘Error and above’ to ‘Debug and above’.
Cockpit acts like a graphical front-end for the systemd journal.
For more in-depth log analysis, you can:
- Use
journalctl directly from terminal (SSH), which offers more advanced filtering options;
- Use
journalctl -o json for structured data output and analyze with tools outside Freedombox-environment.
What I don’t get, on my Pioneer the systemd journal is missing logs from July 24 while July 23 and 25 are present (write to disk option is active). This could be the result of a clean-up/rotate job? But I can see the messages in Cockpit, is there some kind of buffering?