Debugging

The Debugging page is a live, structured view of the robot’s entire console — every node and process, in one place, in your browser. It’s the fastest way to see what the robot is doing (or why it isn’t) without SSH.

​

Why it’s more complete than /rosout

Robot logs are usually scattered: each program prints in its own format, and a lot of output — library messages, the launch system, low-level connection errors — never reaches the standard ROS log topic at all. The Debugging page reads the robot’s raw console instead, which is a complete superset, and structures it for you. So things that would otherwise be invisible off-robot show up here.

​

The log view

The main pane is a chronological log with a column for each part of a line:

• Time, Level (a colored badge), Source, and the Message (tinted for warnings and errors).
• Severity filter and text search to narrow things down.
• Raw / Clean toggle — raw shows the original line; clean shows the parsed message.
• Live / Pause — Live tails new output; scrolling up pauses autoscroll so you can read, and resumes when you scroll back down.
• Clear, plus a shown/total count.

​

Log sources

The panel on the right is a navigator that re-pivots the same logs three ways:

• Launch file -> process -> node -> logger — the full hierarchy.
• Process — flat, expandable to nodes.
• Node / Logger — flat.

Each entry carries a health tint rolled up from the worst severity beneath it, so a subsystem with errors stands out at a glance, with worded counts like 11 errors / 3 warnings. Click a source to scope the log view to it. There’s also an All logs entry and a filter field. For low-level ROS 2 debugging from a terminal — topics, services, and Foxglove — see the ROS 2 debugging guide.