Playing around with automations currently I found it kind of bugging not having a service to easily print something to the log to see what my automation is doing. As a workaround I use notify.file, but it seems much simpler if I could do something like:
...
action:
service: logger.debug
message: "automation has been triggered"
...
The output of that would then just show up as a (debug) log message along with all the other logs and no need for a dedicated logging helper. Of course templating would be handy so we could display all the fancy stuff.
I was looking for exactly the same thing. Thanks for pointing out the workaround (which I need to test but I hope this is juts an extra action to add).
It would also be interesting to trigger the debug possibly as part of a template. When I have if else conditions, I would be happy to be able to log when I am in one of the blocks (the if or the else)