In my last blog, I introduced you to the basics of using the Cloud Foundation SOS tool to complete a health check on your Cloud Foundation environment. Using the SOS health check is a great way for keeping an eye on the health your environment. But when things are not working as they should, you may need to call VMware for support. To quickly diagnose an issue a VMware technical support engineer would need the logs from all the components of your Cloud Foundation environment. Without Cloud Foundation, this could be a difficult and time-consuming process. This is where the SOS tool is very powerful. The Cloud Foundation SOS tool can gather the logs from all the software and hardware components in your environment. Or you can tell it to gather the logs from just a select few pieces, like only the NSX components. Let’s dive into the tool and see what it can do.
The SoS Tool
To begin, let’s start with where the SoS tool is located. To access it, you need to SSH into the SDDC manager control VM. If your not sure what that is, check out the first blog in this series.
Once you are logged into the SSH console, we will navigate to the /opt/vmware/sddc-support/ directory.
To output a complete log bundle that includes logs from all components and also completes a health check. Run the following command.
./sos
There are a few items to be aware of before you run a full SOS output.
- By default, all output will go to the /var/tmp
- Use –log-dir to change to another location.
- To prevent filling up the SDDC Manager Control VM disk space, all previous SOS log bundles will automatically be deleted.
- Use –no-clean-old-logs option to keep any older log bundles you may need.
Once you start the SOS tool, you should see an output like the one below.
As the tool progresses, it will list the completion percentage and which components it has gathered logs from. You can also note the exact path where the output is being saved to.
If you are only having issues with a specific component, then the SOS tool can be focused to only gather the logs from that area. For instance, If I only wanted to gather logs for NSX I would use the following command. ./sos –nsx-logs
Review the documentation for how to gather logs from other specific components.
Final Output
Once the SOS tool completes the log gathering process, you can go to the output directory. In this directory you will see several folders all neatly organized with log bundles all zipped up for each of the components of Cloud Foundation. I am then able to transfer this folder to my local computer and from there I can upload individual log bundles or zip up the whole folder to send the entire thing to VMware technical support for assistance. One thing to review inside this folder is the summary results of the health check by opening the health-report.log. This will give you a high-level overview of the Health of your environment.
As you can see this tool is quite powerful, with its ability to gather logs from so many components and bundle them up in one location. This tool is a major time saver, which shows the true power of VMware Cloud Foundation. Saving you time and money operating your hybrid cloud infrastructure. More details about the Cloud foundation SOS tool can be found here.
