ROS Kinetic provides two major GUI tools to manage the logging message rqt_logger_level, to set the logging level of the nodes and rqt_console, which is used to visualize, filter, and analyze the logging messages. In this section, we will learn how to use these tools:

$ roslaunch chapter4_tutorials program3.launch

The following command will start the program3 example node. Alternatively, we could run the rqt_console tool:

$ rosrun rqt_console rqt_console

The following window will be open:

In the preceding screenshot, we can see the logging message in the rqt_console GUI, which is where messages are collected and shown in a table that consists of individual columns for the timestamp, the message itself, the severity level, and the node that produced the message, along with other information.

This interface allows us to pause, save, and load previously saved logging messages. We can also clear the list of messages and filter them by using highlighting filters.

Moreover, we can adjust the columns automatically by pressing the Resize columns button and see all the information regarding them, including the line of code that was generated, which is shown in the following screenshot:

In order to set the severity of the loggers, we can use the rqt_logger_level GUI tool:

$ rosrun rqt_logger_level rqt_logger_level

The output is shown in the following screenshot:

As shown in the preceding screenshot, we can select the node, followed by the named logger, and finally its severity. After modification, the new messages received with a severity below the desired level will not appear in the rqt_console GUI.

We can observe that each node has several internal loggers by default, most of which are related to the ROS communication API. Usually, it is not recommended to reduce their severity.