Utilities for analyzing supportconfig tarballs

This repository contains utilities which make it easier to inspect files gathered into a supportconfig tarball.

Contents

• Project goals
• Installation
• Configuration
• Usage
• List of core utilities
• Product-specific extensions

Project goals

The goals of this project are as follows:

• Make the process of analysing supportconfigs as quick and easy as possible.

• Provide more automation around the analysis, so that engineers can spend more time focusing on figuring out the root cause of problems rather than on the mechanics of extracting useful information.

• Be extensible, allowing inclusion of product-specific intelligence, so that each product team can automatically drill down into product-specific debug data as quickly as possible.

• Support analysis of multiple (and potentially related) supportconfigs at the same time. The tmux terminal multiplexer is used to help with this.

• Provide a rich user interface for navigating and analysing subsets of potentially many / large log files. The superb log file navigator lnav is used for this. Other utilities are provided for slicing and dicing the logs in various ways before feeding them to lnav for viewing.

Installation

It's strongly recommended to install these via packages. This will automatically take care of the setup and dependencies on tmux-lib and unpack.

It's possible to install manually, but there really isn't any point, so support for that will be provided reluctantly, if at all.

Configuration

By default, new terminal sessions will be launched using xdg-terminal, which in theory should open your preferred terminal emulator application. However if this doesn't work to your taste, it can be overridden by placing something like

SUPPORTCONFIG_TERMINAL="urxvt-256color -g 200x60 -e"

in either ~/.config/supportconfig/tmux-window or /etc/supportconfig/tmux-window.

In the future, other configuration options may be added. PRs are of course welcome!

Usage

You can launch a supportconfig analysis session in a few different ways:

1. From your web browser, in a new terminal window

   Simply click a supportconfig tarball to download it, and the application MIME handler should kick in and launch a new terminal window with a new tmux session inside it. (You may have to click the file again once it's downloaded, depending on how your browser is configured.)

2. From a CLI, in a new terminal window

   Run

   supportconfig-tmux-window my-supportconfig.tar.bz2
   

   on a supportconfig you've already downloaded. If it's already unpacked, you can run it directly on the unpacked directory:

   supportconfig-tmux-window my-unpacked-supportconfig/
   

   Again, this will create a new tmux session.

3. From a CLI, in the same terminal window

   If you want to reuse an existing terminal window, follow the instructions in step 2 above, but replacing supportconfig-tmux-window with supportconfig-tmux.

The tmux session will launch various terminal windows depending on the contents of the supportconfig. Some may immediately launch lnav on log files which are commonly viewed during analysis sessions, and others may display other useful information as a starting point, and/or offer an interactive shell ready for performing further exploration.

Once the session is launched, there are various other utilities provided which may come in handy in certain situations. See below for details on the full suite of tools.

List of core utilities

Utilities for unpacking supportconfigs

• unpack-supportconfig - a wrapper around split-supportconfig which unpacks the tarball, runs split-supportconfig *.txt, and optionally deletes the packed tarball. Requires the unpack. utility for handling the tarball unpacking. If you followed the recommendation to install these utilities via a package then the dependency will be taken care of, otherwise you will need to install the script somewhere on your $PATH before use.

• split-supportconfig - Generally there is no need to run this directly. Use unpack-supportconfig instead! It extracts snapshots of any config file / log file etc. which is embedded inside a .txt file within the supportconfig. For example plugin-susecloud.txt contains many files such as var/log/crowbar/install.log, which will be extracted to rootfs/var/log/crowbar/install.log.

Utilities for setting up analysis/debugging sessions

• supportconfig-tmux-window - a wrapper around supportconfig-tmux which launches it in a new terminal window. This can be used as an application to handle files with a application/x-supportconfig MIME type (defined here), so that for example analysis sessions can be launched via a single click when downloading supportconfig tarballs from your browser. If you followed the recommendation to install this from a package, the MIME handler will be set up automatically; otherwise, you'll have to run setup-supportconfig-handler yourself.

  (In reality, there is another wrapper supportconfig-tmux-safe in the middle between those two, which ensures that any error occurring during the unpacking or setup of the analysis session remains visible so that the user can correct it.)

• supportconfig-tmux - a wrapper around unpack-supportconfig which additionally creates a new tmux session with a window for viewing each of the log files which you most commonly look at. There is also a dependency on this simple tmux library which should be installed into ~/.tmux.d.

Utilities for viewing log files

• lnav2 - a wrapper around lnav which adds some handy extra options / features

Product-specific extensions

The above utilities are designed to be extensible, so that extra intelligence and automation can be added in order to further facilitate analysis and debugging of particular SUSE products.

Plugins live in the plugins/ subdirectory.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud

SUSE OpenStack Cloud plugins live in the plugins/SOC/ subdirectory.

It is first worth noting that SUSE OpenStack Cloud includes its own plugin for supportconfig which gathers extra product-specific information into a supportconfig tarball run on any node with the product installed. The extensions listed here take advantage of that extra information.

Crowbar-specific extensions (SOCC)

WARNING: some of these are probably ugly hacks which were coded in a hurry. Please help make them better ;-)

• Reconnaissance / information gathering

  • crowbar-MACs - prints a host (MAC) -> alias mapping from a Crowbar admin node supportconfig in YAML format. This is used for informational display but can also be used by crowbar-IPs and rename-crowbar-logs (see below).

  • crowbar-IPs - prints an IP -> alias mapping from a Crowbar admin node supportconfig in YAML format. Requires a MACS.yml file generated by crowbar-MACs.

• Logfile preparation / normalization

  • rename-crowbar-logs - rename one or more files or directories starting with "nts_d" followed by a MAC address, so that they include Crowbar node aliases. Requires a MACS.yml file generated by crowbar-MACs.

  • postprocess-crowbar-logs improve readability / navigability of logs by replacing certain strings both inside the logs and in the filenames with more human-friendly or concise equivalents. For example MAC addresses corresponding to hostnames are replaced with their Crowbar alias (if any), and neutron-openvswitch is abbreviated to OVS.

• Logfile viewing

  • crowbar-regexps - outputs a useful regexp which can be pasted into an lnav filter for a useful search or filter.

  • crowbar-lnav-admin - uses lnav to display a timeline of significant events on the Crowbar admin server.

  • lnav-chef-sync-marks - show all synchronization points between Crowbar nodes in a cluster.

  • lnav-crowbar-logs - post-process, chronologically merge, and filter a bunch of SOCC logs in order to perform analysis on potentially significant events. Expects a log-files.yml file detailing the list of logs to examine; see log-files.yml.sample for an example of what this should look like. The keys in the YAML map represent groups of log files, and are given as CLI arguments to lnav-crowbar-logs in order to select which groups of logs to view, e.g.

    lnav-crowbar-logs crowbar chef
    

    would launch lnav on all Crowbar/Chef logs, whereas

    lnav-crowbar-logs neutron_server neutron_agents
    

    would launch lnav on all neutron logs.

  • lnav-SOCC-filters.txt - some lnav filters which filter SOCC logs for interesting events. This is used by lnav-logs if you specify the -f option.

CLM-specific extensions

There aren't any Ardana / CLM extensions yet, but PRs are warmly welcomed ;-)