txAdmin logs and events: where they are and how to read them

Short answer: txAdmin writes three flat files in txData/<profile>/logs/ — admin.log (admin actions), fxserver.log (the FXServer console) and server.log (joins, chat, deaths, commands). Separately, txAdmin events are runtime events named txAdmin:events:* that your own resource can listen to. Logs and events are not the same thing.

The three log files

They are flat files sitting directly in the logs folder, not subfolders. Several popular guides claim there are admin/, fxserver/ and server/ directories; there are not.

• admin.log — every action an admin takes. Rotates every 7 days, with no file-count or size cap. Line format: [HH:MM:SS][author] message. It does not record the user's IP except from authentication endpoints.
• fxserver.log — the raw FXServer console output. Rotates daily, keeps 7 files, capped at 5G.
• server.log — what happened in-game. Rotates daily, keeps 7 files, capped at 10G.

Rotated files are named <name>_YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS_<index>.log. Note the asymmetry that trips people up: fxserver.log and server.log roll over at midnight, but admin.log runs on a 7-day interval, so "the logs reset every night" is only two thirds true.

Where txData actually is

On Windows, txData sits in the parent of the folder containing FXServer.exe — that is, next to the artifact folder, not inside it. On Linux it follows the same relationship to the server binary. The profile folder is called default unless you changed it with the serverProfile ConVar, so the usual full path is txData/default/logs/.

How to read a line of server.log

The format is [HH:MM:SS] [mutex#id] PlayerName: message. That [mutex#id] is the useful part and it is what makes the file searchable: it identifies one player session. Search the file for a given [mutex#id] and the first hit will be that player's join line, which carries all their identifiers. From there you have every line that session produced, in order.

The event types it records read almost like sentences: a join appears as joined with identifiers <ids>, a disconnect as disconnected (<reason>), a refused join as player join denied due to <reason>, plus chat messages, deaths, commands and explosions.

Action Log and Console Log are not the same page

This one is worth spelling out because at least one hosting documentation site states the opposite. Under System you have two separate pages. Action Log is the admin action record. Console Log is not the FXServer console — it is the console of the txAdmin process itself, served from an in-memory buffer. If you want the actual FXServer console output, that is fxserver.log, and the Download button at the bottom of Live Console hands you the current one as fxserver_<timestamp>.log.

The limits of reading logs in the panel

The Server Log page holds a rolling buffer of 32,000 events in memory. By txAdmin's own estimate that is roughly an hour and three quarters on a busy server. Anything older than the buffer exists only in the file on disk, so for an incident from yesterday the panel will not help you and you need the file. This is also the practical reason people forward events to Discord: not because Discord is a good log store, but because the panel's window is short. If that is what you are after, we cover it in sending txAdmin logs to Discord.

txAdmin events are a different thing

Events named txAdmin:events:* are emitted at runtime for your resources to listen to, so you can react in-game when txAdmin does something — a scheduled restart approaching, a player being warned, the server shutting down. They are not written to any of the three log files and you do not read them in the panel. If you want your own actions to appear in the Server Log, that is a separate call your resource makes deliberately.

What is not in these logs

The logs tell you what a player did in terms the server can observe: they joined, they typed, they died, they ran a command. They cannot tell you what the player was seeing, which is precisely the gap when you are investigating a cheating report rather than a rule break. That is where FiveMonitor sits — watching a player's screen live from the browser, alongside whatever anticheat you run. To be explicit about scope: FiveMonitor is not a log tool. It does not collect, store, index, search or forward server logs, and it is not an anticheat.

Plans start at 9.99 EUR/month with a 7-day free trial and no card. See the plans or start the trial.