Beyond Screenshots... A 'Dash Cam' for your Automations

[stepher]

A while back, I asked about putting screenshot functions in one of the Core VBOs.  I, and others, are still waiting, but this is what happens when I have time to ruminate on a subject...

Screenshots are fine, and they can even be helpful.  They are, however, a snapshot in time.  Sometimes that moment is well after the event that triggered the screenshot.  In the time between, it is possible that something has changed that has obscured the source of the issue.  So, that got me thinking that it would be helpful to be able to maintain an ongoing video of the activities that are occurring.  Some of you may think of this as 'streaming' for your automations, but I was thinking more along the lines of a car dashcam--keeping so many minutes/seconds 'behind' the trigger point and then maybe so many minutes/seconds 'after' the trigger point.  Wrap all that up in a nice little file to be saved offline.

Bonus points for the following:

1. A running timestamp to more clearly track the activities.  And, fine, it can be coded to GMT, if that makes it easier.
2. A running script of the actions from the automation.  Think of this as 'all actions being enabled for the Process Log' but output as closed caption for the video.  Or maybe this is the Process Log and the user can set what actions are displayed.
3. Some visual bookmark for the trigger point, so that we can scrub back and forth from there.
4. Other ideas?

I am thinking this would be used mostly in lower environments, but I have to say I could really use it to troubleshoot some things going on in our Production environment.   We recently upgraded to v7.3.2, which would be an event, in and of itself--but in the time it took for us to get there, some of our primary applications decided they needed to make changes as well.  Not mention the usual chaos that Microsoft doles out with Edge updates.  So, yeah, I think this could be useful.

Thanks for hearing me out,

Red