SoSReport: Generate and analyze machine reports

Introduction

If you've ever contacted Red Hat support, you probably know that they systematically request a sosreport. It's a very practical tool for the support team as it collects command results, log files, configuration files, and other information often essential for diagnosing a problem. Personally, I've installed it on CentOS and it works very well.

Recently, sosreport has also been ported to Debian/Ubuntu, making it a very interesting tool when you have a heterogeneous Linux environment. It's possible to get a quick summary of the provided information via sxconsole. The advantage of sosreport is that it collects essential information without consuming a lot of resources. Therefore, it can be executed in production environments without risking any slowdowns (depending on the production environment, of course).

Installation

Installing it is simple, as it's part of the packages available in the base repository:

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yum install sos

If you want to install sxconsole to get a summary:

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yum install sx

Utilization

sosreport

Using it is simple. On the machine where the problem is occurring, run:

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> sosreport --report

sosreport (version 2.2)

This utility will collect some detailed  information about the
hardware and setup of your CentOS system.
The information is collected and an archive is  packaged under
/tmp, which you can send to a support representative.
CentOS will use this information for diagnostic purposes ONLY
and it will be considered confidential information.

This process may take a while to complete.
No changes will be made to your system.

Press ENTER to continue or CTRL-C to quit.

Please enter your first name (if you have more than one) and your last name [localhost]:
Please enter the case number that you are generating this report for [None]: 123

Launching plugins. Please wait...

  Completed [45/45] ...
Creating compressed archive...

Your sosreport has been generated and saved in:
  /tmp/sosreport-localhost.123-20130315154819-d582.tar.xz

The md5sum is: 4136a18ba7a5e7e2151203b71bc3d582

Please send this file to your support representative.

The report option will generate an HTML file that can be used more easily in some cases. For the instructions to enter:

• localhost: ideally, enter the machine name, it's easier to find, especially if you generate reports for multiple machines
• Case number: this is the ticket number. If it's for your personal needs, you can enter anything
• Finally, in /tmp you'll find an archive with all the collected information

You can then easily extract them:

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tar -xaf /tmp/sosreport-localhost.123-20130315154819-d582.tar.xz

sxconsole

sxconsole will generate a summary from a sysreport archive. Here's the usage syntax:

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sxconsole <ticket_number> -E -d -r <sosreport_archive> -R ~/tmp/

• ticket_number: this is the ticket number that was inserted when creating the sosreport. You can find this number in the name of the sosreport archive
• -E: enables all modules (cluster, storage...)
• -d: debug mode
• -r: the sosreport of a machine. If you have multiple machines, you can execute multiple -r with one machine at a time
• -R: this is a temporary storage directory that must be created beforehand

Here's an example using the syntax described above:

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sxconsole 123 -E -d -r /tmp/sosreport-localhost.123-20130315154819-d582.tar.xz -R ~/tmp/

References

https://github.com/sosreport/sosreport