Why does Model Builder not have a "tool" to allow you to customize what logs and output you receive?

[AndrewWiegman]

I cannot be the only one that is surprised that a multi-million dollar company that provides services to many fortune 500 companies does not have the most basic functions such as customizing logging and alerting tools within ArcGIS Pro Model Builder.  

I'm extremely new to  ArcGIS, I've been a Server and Network Administrator for the past 2 decades and found this niche field where I can use my skills and my hobbies together.  That being said, every tool I have used in the past 2 decades has the ability to setup and customize logging.  But ESRI apparently doesn't. 

Yes, for sure we can simply add a few lines of Python code, but it's kinda pointless if there's a model that needs to change every month/quarter/year and we forget to add back our manual lines of python code.  

It would be great to have the ability to not only customize logging to say, a text file in a directory, but also alerting via email for not only errors and warnings but also for successfully ran items. 

[ThomasHoman]

I never thought about it but you are totally right! 

In all my python code I have a log writing function defined so why not the more visual toolchains like ModelBuilder.

[DuncanHornby]

Modelbuilder does produce a log, it's the message window, the latest version of ArcPro 3.4 even expands this with additional messaging, you just need to turn it on. I suggest you explore the options settings...

A new tool with the 3.4 now even allows you to display custom messages as a model runs.

Although to my knowledge modelbuilder does not allow you to log to a text file you can simply press the copy button on the message window and paste it into notepad! Have you tried that?

Finally creating emails as alerts could be done by developing some python and having it run that in a calculate value tool. 

So basically most of what you ask is already there, you just need to dive into the options and get to know modelbuilder better.

[AndrewWiegman]

Hey @DuncanHornby 

Thinking in terms of "production", we're not going to be running ArcGIS Pro for a python task that will be automated.  So the point to my question was that it would be nice to have an option (while building your model) to add specific points where you want to see specific output... so that when you run your automated python task (without ArcGIS Pro) it exports those items to either a log file or sends an email about specific events.  As I mentioned, yes, it is easy enough to simply add in lines of code that do just that to the python script once it's complete but that defeats the purpose of modelbuilder being so stupid simple... 

Example... say I want to know (on an automated weekly task) how many records were processed (on each step) and I wanted it output to a log file and email... it would be so much easier to add a "log tool" for these specific steps so I don't have search through the code and add it manually.  

As a non-developer with very little python knowledge, this would be a handy addition.  Otherwise I'd be garbling together someones code I googled from 2010... lol