Collecting data for IBM Power Virtualization Center problems

Sometimes you cannot solve a problem by troubleshooting the symptoms. In such cases, you must collect diagnostic data.

About this task

Collecting and inspecting data before you open a problem management record (PMR) can help you to answer the following questions:

Do the symptoms match any known problems? If so, has a fix or workaround been published?
Can the problem be identified and resolved without a code fix?
When does the problem occur?

The diagnostic data that you collect, and the sources from which you collect that data, are dependent on the type of problem that you are investigating. A base set of information is typically required for diagnosing and resolving a product-level or component-level problem. For specific symptoms, you must collect more problem-specific data.

When you submit a problem to IBM® Support, you must provide a base set of information, such as debug logs, screenshots, and a timestamp. The PowerVC diagnostic data collection tool, also called the powervc-diag tool, can be used to collect information. The tool is in the /usr/bin directory of your PowerVC installation, though you do not need to specify the path when invoking the tool. However, you must have root access to run it.

Before collecting diagnostic data, it is recommended that you use the powervc-log command to set debug logging on the appropriate component. See this topic for use of the powervc-log command: Technote: Simple method to enable debug logging for PowerVC. For example, to dynamically enable debug logging for Nova without restarting that service, the command is: /usr/bin/powervc-log compute debug --enable. The debug logs are large, so after recreating the issue and collecting the logs, turn off debug logging.

Note: Support for dynamically enabling debug logging without service restart is available only for services namely nova, cinder, neutron, glance and keystone. For other services, service restart is required and the command must be run with the --restart option for changes to take effect.

The powervc-diag tool collects a variety of information into a single archive. Inspecting log files is a typical first step in problem determination. The OpenStack service log files can be found in the following locations within the archive.

OpenStack service log files: /var/log/nova; /var/log/cinder; /var/log/glance; /var/log/neutron; /var/log/keystone

What to do next

After you collect the appropriate diagnostic data, you can complete the following tasks:

Contacting IBM Support
Exchanging information with IBM Support