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documentation.suse.com / Gathering system information for support

Gathering system information for support

Publication Date: 27 Jun 2024
WHAT?

The article gives instructions on how to gather information that can be passed to the SUSE support.

WHY?

You want to know how to properly gather information about your system if there is a problem with the system.

EFFORT

It takes up to 15 minutes of reading time.

GOAL

You will learn how to create an archive of information about your system that can provide details about problems in your system to the SUSE support.

1 The supportconfig tool

 

If problems occur, you can use the supportconfig command-line tool to create a detailed system report. The tool collects information about the system, such as the current kernel version, hardware, installed packages, partition setup, and much more.

The command-line tool is provided by the package supportutils, which is installed by default. However, supportconfig can integrate plug-ins that are used with each running of supportconfig. Which plug-ins are available on your system, depends on installed packages. The plug-ins are stored in the /usr/lib/supportconfig/plugins/ directory.

The supportconfig tool creates a TAR archive with detailed system information that you can hand over to Global Technical Support.

2 Collecting system information with supportconfig

 

To create a TAR archive with detailed system information that you can hand over to Global Technical Support, follow the procedure:

  1. Run supportconfig as root. Usually, it is enough to run this tool without any options. For common options, refer to Section 2.1, “Common supportconfig options”. 

    # supportconfig


           Support Utilities - Supportconfig
                          Script Version: 3.1.11-46.2 
                          Library Version: 3.1.11-29.6
                          Script Date: 2022 10 18
[...]
Gathering system information
  Data Directory:    /var/log/scc_d251_180201_1525 1

  Basic Server Health Check...                 Done 2
  RPM Database...                              Done 2
  Basic Environment...                         Done 2
  System Modules...                            Done 2
[...]
  File System List...                          Skipped 3
[...]
  Command History...                           Excluded 4
[...]
  Supportconfig Plugins:                       1 5
    Plugin: pstree...                          Done
[...]
Creating Tar Ball

==[ DONE ]===================================================================
  Log file tar ball: /var/log/scc_d251_180201_1525.txz 6
  Log file size:     732K
  Log file md5sum:   bf23e0e15e9382c49f92cbce46000d8b
=============================================================================/

    The command output is described below this procedure.

  2. Wait for the tool to complete the operation.

  3. The default archive location is /var/log, with the file name format being scc_HOST_DATE_TIME.txz. For the archive content description, refer to Section 3, “Overview of the archive content”.

1

The temporary data directory to store the results. This directory is archived as a tar file, see 6.

2

The feature was enabled (either by default or selected manually) and executed successfully. The result is stored in a file (see Table 1, “Comparison of features and file names in the TAR archive”).

3

The feature was skipped because certain files of one or more RPM packages were changed.

4

The feature was excluded because it was deselected via the -x option.

5

The script found one plug-in and executes the plug-in pstree. The plug-in was found in the directory /usr/lib/supportconfig/plugins/. See the man page for details.

6

The tar file name of the archive, compressed with xz by default.

2.1 Common supportconfig options

 

Usually, it is sufficient to run supportconfig without any options. However, you may need to use the following options:

-E MAIL

To provide the contact e-mail.

-N NAME

To provide your name.

-O COMPANY

To provide your company name.

-P PHONE

To provide your phone number.

-i KEYWORDS

To specify keywords that limit the features to check. KEYWORDS is a comma-separated list of case-sensitive keywords.

This option is particularly useful if you have already localized a problem that relates to a specific area or feature set only. For example, you have detected problems with LVM and want to test a recent change that you introduced to the LVM configuration. In this case, it makes sense to gather the minimum supportconfig information around LVM only: 

# supportconfig -i LVM
-F

To list all keywords that you can use to limit the features to check.

-m

To reduce the amount of the information being gathered.

-l

To collect already rotated log files. This is especially useful in high-logging environments or after a kernel crash when syslog rotates the log files after a reboot.

3 Overview of the archive content

 

The TAR archive contains all the results from the features. Depending on what you have selected (all or only a small set), the archive can contain more or fewer files. The set of features can be limited using the -i option (see Section 2.1, “Common supportconfig options”).

To list the contents of the archive, use this tar command: 

# tar xf /var/log/scc_&exampleclient;_180131_1545.txz

The following file names are always available inside the TAR archive:

Minimum files in archive
 
basic-environment.txt

Contains the date when this script was executed and system information like version of the distribution, hypervisor information, and more.

basic-health-check.txt

Contains basic health checks, such as uptime, virtual memory statistics, free memory and hard disk, checks for zombie processes, and more.

hardware.txt

Contains basic hardware checks like information about the CPU architecture, a list of all connected devices, interrupts, I/O ports, kernel boot messages, and more.

messages.txt

Contains log messages from the system journal.

rpm.txt

Contains a list of all installed RPM packages, their names and versions and where they come from.

summary.xml

Contains information in XML format, such as distribution, version and product-specific fragments.

supportconfig.txt

Contains information about the supportconfig script itself.

y2log.txt

Contains YaST-specific information like specific packages, configuration files and log files.

The following table lists all available features and their file names.

Table 1: Comparison of features and file names in the TAR archive
 
FeatureFile name
APPARMOR security-apparmor.txt
AUDIT security-audit.txt
AUTOFS fs-autofs.txt
BOOT boot.txt
BTRFS fs-btrfs.txt
DAEMONS systemd.txt
CIMOM cimom.txt
CRASH crash.txt
CRON cron.txt
DHCP dhcp.txt
DISK fs-diskio.txt
DNS dns.txt
DOCKER docker.txt
DRBD drbd.txt
ENV env.txt
ETC etc.txt
HISTORY shell_history.txt
ISCSI fs-iscsi.txt
LDAP ldap.txt
LIVEPATCH kernel-livepatch.txt
LVM lvm.txt
MEM memory.txt
MOD modules.txt
MPIO mpio.txt
NET network-*.txt
NFS nfs.txt
NTP ntp.txt
NVME nvme.txt
OCFS2 ocfs2.txt
PAM pam.txt
PODMAN podman.txt
PRINT print.txt
PROC proc.txt
SAR sar.txt
SLERT slert.txt
SLP slp.txt
SMT smt.txt
SMART fs-smartmon.txt
SMB samba.txt
SRAID fs-softraid.txt
SSH ssh.txt
SSSD sssd.txt
SYSCONFIG sysconfig.txt
SYSFS sysfs.txt
TRANSACTIONAL transactional-update.txt
TUNED tuned.txt
UDEV udev.txt
UFILES fs-files-additional.txt
UP updates.txt
WEB web.txt

4 Submitting information to Global Technical Support

 

After you have created the archive using the supportconfig tool, you can submit the archive to SUSE.

4.1 Creating a service request number

 

Before handing over the supportconfig data to Global Technical Support, you need to generate a service request number first. You will need it to upload the archive to support.

To create a service request, go to https://scc.suse.com/support/requests and follow the instructions on the screen. Write down the service request number.

Note
Note: Privacy statement

SUSE treats system reports as confidential data. For details about our privacy commitment, see https://www.suse.com/company/policies/privacy/.

4.2 Uploading targets

 

After having created a service request number, you can upload your supportconfig archives to Global Technical Support. In the examples below, 12345678901 serves as a placeholder for your service request number. Replace the placeholder with the service request number you created in Section 4.1, “Creating a service request number”.

The following procedures assume that you have already created a supportconfig archive but have not uploaded it yet.

Procedure 1: Submitting information to support on servers with Internet connectivity
 

  1. Run the supportconfig tool as follows:

    1. To use the default upload target https://support-ftp.us.suse.com/incoming/upload.php?file={tarball}, run: 

      > sudo supportconfig -ur 12345678901

    2. For the FTPS upload target ftps://support-ftp.us.suse.com, use the following command: 

      > sudo supportconfig -ar 12345678901

      To use a different upload target, for example, for the EMEA area, use the -U followed by the particular URL, either https://support-ftp.emea.suse.com/incoming/upload.php?file={tarball} or ftps://support-ftp.emea.suse.com/incoming/: 

      > sudo supportconfig -r 12345678901 -U https://support-ftp.emea.suse.com/incoming

  2. After the TAR archive arrives in the incoming directory of our FTP server, it becomes automatically attached to your service request.

If the servers do not provide Internet connectivity, follow the steps below:

Procedure 2: Submitting information to support on servers without Internet connectivity
 

  1. Run the following: 

    > sudo supportconfig -r 12345678901

  2. Manually upload the /var/log/scc_SR12345678901*txz archive to one of our servers. The selection of a server depends on your location in the world:

  3. After the TAR archive arrives in the incoming directory of our FTP server, it becomes automatically attached to your service request.