Metaswitch Service Assurance Server (SAS) is an outstanding tool for reviewing call traces. We use it every day, and it’s a huge help in troubleshooting problems with VoIP or TDM calls.
So I was surprised last week to learn a really useful trick. How is it possible that there’s still more to learn after all these years?
Text search within SAS logs
If there’s one thing SAS is missing, it’s a proper tool to search within the full details of traces. Maybe you’re trying to find a rogue phone number that’s found its way into the signaling messages, or maybe you’ve seen an error message and you’re trying to find where it is introduced. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just search for that – and see any reference to that text anywhere within the SAS event logs?
You can use your browser’s built-in text search feature on the detailed timeline to find anything that’s in an event summary title. But you can’t search inside the details of the events – not unless you click on each of them one-by-one. It would be helpful to be able to search in the complete text of all of the events, and that feature doesn’t exist.
That is, a big “Search Within Events” button doesn’t exist. There is a button that allows you to do that, though. Counterintuitively, the button is called “Print”.
At the top of a trace page, find and click the Print button:
Doing so will bring up the print dialog:
The dropdown menus here correspond to the dropdown menus that are on the detailed timeline tab of SAS. The event levels are the standard High Level, High Level and Protocol Flows, Detailed, and Engineering Level. Select the level you’d like to search in. You can filter by system (e.g., CFS, Perimeta, etc.) if desired as well.
Once you’ve made your selections, click the Print Details button. The Print Summary button won’t give you anything more than what you see in the detailed timeline table of event summaries, so Print Details is what you want.
The Print Details button will open up a plain text version of the SAS trace in a new browser tab/window. It will contain everything in the detailed timeline table, but it will also include the full details that go in the bottom SAS pane for each event as well:
Now you can use the browser’s built-in search function to search for any text within the full details of any SAS event. It’s magic!
I hope you find this useful.
Thanks to David Wunderlich (LERG-update expert and STIR/SHAKEN expert at Award Consulting) for sharing this discovery with our team, and taking the time to write up these helpful instructions.
