Diagnostic data collection

If you need to investigate problems or issues with your appliance, there are three ways for diagnostic data to be gathered from your system.

Call Home

If enabled for certain types of issues, diagnostic data will be automatically gathered and sent to IBM for analysis. No further work is required for this first pass of diagnostics to be included in the Call Home generated service request. PMRs are opened automatically for the following event types:

• HW_SERVICE_REQUESTED
• SW_SERVICE_REQUESTED
• DB_SERVICE_REQUESTED

With the Call Home enabled, you can also manually create a PMR for any type of event by using the Monitor > System > Notifications view in the web console.

Diagnostic data for other appliance issues

There are other types of appliance hardware and software issues which do not automatically generate service requests by default. The appliance will still automatically gather diagnostic data for many of these, including the following:

• HW_NEEDS_ATTENTION
• SW_NEEDS_ATTENTION
• DB_NEEDS_ATTENTION

In some instances, you will receive email notification that such an issue has occurred; this email notification will include a pointer to the diagnostic data payload collected for this issue. Alternatively, the location of this diagnostic collection can be found as part of the detailed description of any issue.

To display log file path, run the ap issues <issue_id> command, as in the example below:

[root@node0101 ~]# ap issues 1008

General Information
   ID                       : 1008
   Date                     : 2018-12-18 01:24:14.456407
   Close Date               : None
   Target                   : hw://hadomain1.node3.nic_eth2
   Target Type              : nic_eth
   Severity                 : WARNING
   Title                    : Unhealthy component detected
   Stateful                 : 1
   Referenced Alert ID      : None

Classification
   Group                    : HW
   Type                     : HW_NEEDS_ATTENTION
   Reason Code              : 201

Processing Status
   State                    : DELIVERED
   Log Collection Status    : COLLECTED
   SMTP Status              : FAILED
   SNMP Status              : UNKNOWN
   Call Home Status         : NOT_APPLICABLE

Service Request
   SRID                     : None
   SR Status                : None

Collected Logs
   Log File Path            : /var/log/appliance/platform/management/alerts/alert_1008.tar.gz
   Log File Node            : hadomain1.node1
   Log File Checksum        : de963ba04512f7f9136899d1d976771f

Additional Data:
   Message                  : Status on component nic_eth at location hw://hadomain1.node3.nic_eth2 is WARNING
   bdf                      : 0002:01:00.0
   creator_id               : node@hw://hadomain1.node3
   driver                   : bnx2x
   driver_version           : bc 7.10.4
   errdata1                 : WARNING: Port C6-P1 within the same physical interface type on the card (fab1, bdf 0002:01:00.0) (links to fabsw01a, port 6) link state is DOWN
   led                      : off
   location                 : hw://hadomain1.node3.nic_eth2
   position                 : C6
   reason_checksum          : 9b31aa9728cde678222686e436eeb43a
   serial                   :
   status                   : WARNING
   type                     : nic_eth
   type_desc                : Quad Port 1Gbit/10Gbit NIC
   version                  : bc 7.10.4

Generated: 2019-03-21 14:03:20

Diagnostic data outside of any specific platform-reported issue

To provide IBM support with diagnostic data not tied to either of the above cases, the appliance includes a single data gathering utility, called apdiag. Data collection can be done based on targeting a specific appliance component or an ever growing collection of general symptoms. If you open a support ticket with IBM directly, you might be asked specifically to run apdiag with a defined set of arguments or parameters. When you execute apdiag, the responding output to the console will include path and file name of the gathered diagnostic tar-ball. For more information on the apdiag command, see Running diagnostics by using the apdiag command.