I don't see a screen shot, so I'll take a stab and just answer kind of generically.

There are three tools that work for logging data:

1. Alarms - These capture any event set up in the alarm list and the full message gets written to the SD card. But the drawback you have found is that is consumes space in your alarm list.
2. Message Display - Can be customized and saves to SD/USB as well. This only runs when the message display object is on the Active screen. Easy enough to work around by placing the control off the visible edge of a background screen.
3. Log Manager - New in V9, this often works as the data source for line graphs. It will only capture numbers, discrete values and time stamps (no strings for now). This saves to a CSV file and in the system folder a SQLite file which can be viewed using any common SQLite browser. We have very limited support for working with the SQLite file.

When using USB/SD cards, there are a few System Bits to control the files.

• Sys Copy Log to USB - Allows the logs to be written to SD1, but you can copy them to a USB stick to take them back to your PC without interrupting the panel's operations.
• Sys XXX Eject - all storage has an eject bit. This will finish any ongoing write operation and unmount the drive for safe removal. When you plug it back in, it will automatically be recognized and remount the drive.
• Sys Delete XXX Log - This will delete all log files on a device.

Overall Log Manager will provide the most optimized way to write data based on flexible trigger states.

We don't log to internal memory because all solid state memory has a limited number of read/write cycles. That is usually pretty high - no problem writing and updating a project, but if you were to repeatedly log data to the same block of memory, it would likely shorten the life of the panel. The SD cards we sell are more expensive than Best Buy or Amazon because they are SLC (Single Level Cell). It has the highest life of solid state memory. But if you want something easy, we can write to most any SD card or cheap thumb drive.

The new Log Manager in V9 will write a CSV file to a folder under SD1\Log\LogManager\{Log Name}\Log..with a timestamp of when the file was created in the filename. Make sure you sync the Panel Clock before you start writing.

It adds an Index and Date column. The Index is just a counter and the Date is the Date and Time when the values were captured. If you link a Line graph to the Log file, it will use all this data - which allows the line trends to persist across save events and even download events (as long as you don't change the Log file).

You can use the Webserver or the "Data Maintenance" tool on the Panel ribbon to download these files.