When I've been in a situation like this, I've written a second daemon (or had a second listener in the existing daemon) to take the place of a CLI, listening at a particular port and responding to a very limited command set of your own choosing.
In this case, all you really care about is triggering the function on demand, so you could even have it trigger when you connect to this second port, and then report results back to the socket.
I strongly recommend, by the way, making sure your embedded system has some more generic mechanism for logging information to persistent storage and retrieving that log. It doesn't have to be syslog or anything so complicated. But you will want that ability in the future to enable forensic analysis of problems in the field.