Capture SystemLink Forwarding Service Logs

If you suspect that the SystemLink Forwarding Service is crashing or there are transactions continuously being added to the quarantine, you can run the Forwarding Service manually from DOS with verbose logging enabled to get more specific details.

This guide provides instructions on how you can manually run the service with verbose logging to capture debugging information. You should only perform this in a patched system, refer to Resolving SystemLink Client Failures to Forward Data When Store and Forward is Enabled for more details and to avoid debugging an issue that has already been resolved in the patch.

These steps require Administrator permissions and remote access to the system. 

1. Open the Windows Services Manager (type “Services” into the Start Menu) and disable "NI SystemLink Forwarding Service". This will prevent it from running automatically in the background while manually running it. Be sure to turn this back on when you are done (restarting the system also turns it back on). 

2. Ensure that there is data in the store directory “C:\ProgramData\National Instruments\Skyline\Data\Store” (see Manually Inspecting SystemLink Store and Forward Stored Transactions). If not, run some tests in TestStand to generate data. 

3. Open a command prompt and run the following:

4. A new command prompt will appear that will include detailed logging. Unfortunately, you cannot specify a file to log to or redirect the output to a file, so you will have to copy/paste from the console window to a file. If there are lot of files in the store directory, the command prompt will run out of space before it reaches the end. You may need to monitor it and capture parts of the log early in the process, errors will likely occur early. If there is a lot of data, the forwarding process can take hours.

5. Re-enable "NI SystemLink Forwarding Service" in Windows Service Manager or restart the client system.