There is no need for a log collection mechanism to be very tightly integrated with the log display mechanism. Both upshot and ravel use the alog package for creating logfiles. It consists of a set of C macros and Fortran-callable subroutines for logging arbitrary events, with event types arbitrarily by the programmer. An event consists of an event type, a process id, a timestamp, and one integer and one string of data. Events are collected in local memory by each process and only written to disk when the run is complete. After the run is over the separate log files are merged on the timestamps to produce a single properly sorted log file. Optionally, the user prepares a second file defining process states by specifying an entry and exit event for each state. These two files are the input to both upshot and ravel.