[Asterisk-Dev] Debugging: selectable feature?

[John Todd]

I find myself wading through very long trails of debugging logs for 
Asterisk calls, which is terribly difficult (impossible?) when there 
are high volumes of calls on a system.

I am not familiar with the innards of how debugging is activated or 
deactivated, so perhaps this question reflects that poor 
understanding:  Would it be possible to create an application that, 
when called, activates debugging output (very verbose) to the ast_cli 
window, or changes the status of that channel for it's duration to be 
"very verbose"?   This would help me a great deal in debugging 
problems with specific channels; I can always create a GotoIf or 
extension mapping that activates the debugging on certain 
circumstances.

Something like:

exten => 1112222,1,Debug(level)

Of course, there is much debugging that is not specific to the 
channel (i.e.: SIP events happening in the background, Zap/PRI 
events, etc.) which I would not expect to be activated by such a 
command.  I'm just looking for events triggered specifically by this 
channel.  Difficult to isolate, I imagine.

Even if I could just turn debugging on and off on some type of 
event-based triggers that do not isolate the debugging to a specific 
channel, that would work - temporal isolation is better than no 
isolation, but not as good as event-chain isolation.  I might be 
interested in creating some sort of dialplan that lets me 
remote-control my Asterisk system into dumping a bunch of logging 
data to the logfiles by DTMF sequence (without running an ugly script 
to move things around in logger.conf and issue a "reload".)

JT