Hello, welcome to Oracle Linux how-to video series.
This video is to help you get an understanding of diagnostic data acquired by Oracle Linux
support for troubleshooting a problem.
All steps and procedures explained and performed in this video are based on Oracle Linux release
7.
Diagnostic logs are essential to verify and find the cause of the problem being faced.
Oracle Linux support can help you quickly and accurately in all the required diagnostic
data is available.
When a service request is raised with Oracle Linux support for assistance with the problem,
we look for three main diagnostic logs according to the situation.
The sosreport, the OSwatcher and the memory dump.
Through these datasets Oracle Linux support gets information about a system such as hardware
configuration, software configuration, its operational state, and performance metrics.
These tools do not collect any user information.
All collected data is automatically purged within a week of closure of the service request.
Let's look into what sosreport is and why Oracle Linux support needs its help in fixing
a problem.
The sosreport utility collects debugging information about a system such as hardware configuration,
software configuration and its operational state.
It generates a compressed tarball of debugging information that gives an overview of the
most important logs and configuration of a Linux system that you can send to a support
representative.
With this, the time spent on separate data requests by the support team and upload by
you is greatly reduced.
Collecting a sosreport is just keystrokes away with one single command.
Let's see how to install sosreport and collect it.
We are installing the sos package.
Now let's collect it.
To collect sosreport, we just have to run the sosreport command and let's collect it
in verbose mode.
So it prompts for us to enter the service request number that we are collecting this
sosreport archive for.
Let us enter a random number for the purpose of this demo.
So we see that it is collecting.
Sosreport is comprised of several plugins which can be enabled or disabled based on
requirement.
Each plug-in collects separate diagnostic configuration data.
Once the collection is complete, it will generate a tar file.
We see that it's stored here.
We see that it is a compressed file.
This file can be uploaded to support via the My Oracle Support service request.
OSwatcher is a tool that captures performance metrics from the operating system.
It is available as a downloadable utility, which is the OSwatcher black-box, and also
as an installable RPM file.
It stores historical data as per the retention policy.
This can be configured via the configuration file for OSwatcher.
The OSwatcher is a shell script based tool.
To troubleshoot resource utilization and performance problems Oracle Linux support, recommends
to run OSwatcher for extensive periods.
When using the OSwatcher black-box, if the system is a rebooted for any reason, the system
administrator would have to manually start the OSwatcher blackbox.
Using the installable package, OSwatcher can be run as a standard service on Oracle Linux
to collect the required runtime data.
Let's see how to install OSwatcher, its service and the configuration files.
Let's install the OSwatcher package.
Now all we have to do it startup the service of OSwatcher.
Let's check its status.
We see that it is running.
The configuration file for Oswatcher is present under /etc/sysconfig/ and the file name is
OSwatcher.
It contains the directory where the OSwatcher logs should be stored and the interval in
which the logs should be collected and the amount of time the old files should be kept,
by default this is for 48 hours, and the default compression method to store the log files.
This can be changed as per requirement.
Let's go to the archive log directory where the OSwactcher logs are stored.
So we see the archive directory.
Here we see that the various directories are created for different kinds of statics to
collections.
When a performance related issue occurs, you can upload these archive data to Oracle Linux
support for their troubleshooting.
In addition to sosreport and OS watcher, Oracle Linux support also relies on kernel memory
dump to find root cause in cases of system Hang or crash.
For more information on kdump, please watch our video on kdump configuration.
Here are some useful links and My Oracle Support knowledge documents that will help you get
more information on Oracle Linux, sosreport and OSwatcher.
The knowledge documents can be accessed by logging in to support.oracle.com
That ends our short video on diagnostic data collection.
Thank you for watching