Use this technical support tool to collect information for troubleshooting
Support Report is a technical support tool AppDynamics customers and Support Engineers can use to collect and archive the information needed to correctly identify technical issues.
This article explains the tool, and its configuration and use.
In this article...
What is Support Report?
Support Report is a technical support tool that facilitates the process of collecting and archiving data, for AppDynamics customers and Support Engineers alike.
It gathers general operating system information vital for correctly identifying issues—including hardware-specific information, logs, and configuration—both from the AppDynamics On-prem components (such as Controller, Enterprise Console, EUM, Events Service) and from across the operating system.
Prerequisites
Support Report works on most Linux flavors. It needs only Bash Unix shell, which is available on every Linux. It is designed to not crash even when a fundamental tool is unavailable.
Though the script can be run by either the regular user or by root, the tool will only be able to collect all information and logs when it is running by root. That said, it will not crash or give up when running as a regular user.
All of the above make dependencies and requirements very low, allowing it to work accurately on any machine.
How it works
The tool is made from a Bash script and tries to gather information about the system from generally available places and basic system tools. If a particular tool is not present in the customer's environment, this script will keep working, simply informing that the tool is not there. The script is meant to detect Linux flavor, adjusting all needed paths and behaviors accordingly.
If, as strongly recommended, the customer provides a password to the MySQL database, the tool will connect to it and gather information from the database as well. The tool does not collect any customer metrics or other sensitive information from the database.
Since AppDynamics applications can be installed freely in any directory on a server, and support_report is not an official part of the AppD package, the tool needs to correctly detect where actually files of interest are located.
It is quite easy to tell when the Controller process is running. But this tool troubleshoots based on the more difficult scenario of no running AppD processes. It looks for the correct path by "brute force", by finding specific files on the server.
How do I run the Support Report?
The Support Report tool can be attached to the Zendesk support ticket by an AppDynamics Engineer, or it can be downloaded from this article (see below).
After it is uploaded (by SCP, or in any other way convenient for the customer) to a server where troubleshooting needs to be performed, the tool can be run from any directory.
Use the controls to pick the specific information you’d like to collect—and to disable the information you DON’T want to share.
Below is a sample run with ‘-help’ option , where all available parameters are described.
$ ./support-report.sh -help
Usage: support-report.sh [ -CEUScpHlazeoxv ] [ -d days of logs ] [ -o dir ]
-C Collect information about Controller
-E Collect information about Enterprise Console
-U Collect information about EUM server
-S Collect information about Events Service
-c Disable generating system configuration
-p Enable measuring system load/performance. It will be 720 of 5s samples. 1h in total.
-H Disable generating hardware report
-l Disable gathering system logs
-a Disable gathering AppD logs
-d Number of days back of logs to retrieve (default is 3 days)
-z Do not zip report and leave it in /tmp
-e Encrypt output report archive with password
-o Set the support-report output path
-x Keep the support-report logs in /tmp for debugging
-v Version
What happens once a report is generated?
Once a report is generated, the entire report archive is stored in a location related to AppDynamics component, on the customer’s server. The customer can easily review the report’s information before sending it to technical support.
Example output from the tool:
root@appd-ha1:~# ./support-report.sh
Determining system environment and configuration...
Provide controller MySQL root user password:
Provide Controller root user password (hit enter to skip):
Generating report...
Building system configuration
Building package list
Checking hypervisor
Getting EC2 instance info
Copying hardware profile
Memory information
Storage information
Copying system logs..Done!
Getting systemd info
Networking information
Init info
Checking time config
Checking AppD environment
Numa stats
Fetching install user environment
Get processes. Done!
Collecting TOP output
Creating Appdynamics files list
Getting selinux config
Controller logs
Collecting rotating logs from 3 days
Mysql Controller logs
Controller configs
Controller Keystore content
Collecting Controller SQL queries
Controller related information
Controller report
HA and DB replication status
Creating report archive... Done
The support-report has been saved to:
/appdynamics/platform/product/controller/logs/support-report/support-report_controller_appd-ha1.conserit.pl_2022-05-20_00-15-22.tar.gz
You will be directed where to submit this report by your technical support contact.
The tool's report output can be attached to a Zendesk support ticket proactively by the customer. It will greatly speed up the troubleshooting process, as very likely all the needed information to help - will already be present in the initial Zendesk message!
Additional Resources
