Release Automation

Hello everybody

I am quite new here and got told that there were some issues collecting log informations about the deployments.

Basically we would like to capture every deployment action log that was produced on any target system involved into an artifact deployment. And these log files can be quite huge and contain a lot of important informations why e.g. installation/update xyz failed.

Is there any may be hidden functionality in RA to capture those log files (from agents), store them in the RA database and enabling a drill down from GUI level?

Any hints for best practices?

There are two articles here that I think will address your question.

The best and easiest method is to collect logs automatically via ASAP. This collects all logs, so it's important to note (especially if sending logs to Support) what time frame the problem happened since usually the vast amount of logs span a number of days.  You can read more about that here: Release Automation KB: Easy and Elegant way to collect logs via ASAP

You can also manually gather logs, if you're interested in doing so. This article details what logs are of interest for which situations and where they can be found: Release Automation KB: Which logs to be collected to enable support to give quick assistance?

Hi James

Thank you for these two articles.

Having a problem with my RA deployment infrastructure I'll need to collect log files for a support case this information is quite useful. If my management server goes mad I have to get the NAC logfiles from it's low level file system as well.

BUT

Normally I run into a problem with my application I'm deploying. Installing and configuring some application on target systems produce application specific log files that I cannot reach with the currently available functionality.

As far as I see there is no possibility to enforce RA to collect target log files on actions that are executed on the agents and store them in a central storage. It's also not possible to drill down to action specific log files captured from a target system in the ROC gui.

And, to be honest, storing some action log information in a variable of some bytes length, that's no logging, that's a joke.

Capturing application deployment specific log files and enabling a drill down to the information on GUI and REST-API level that's a key functionality of a deployment tool.

I think it shall not be a customer task to implement some log file capturing and error finding tool around RA.

Thank you for the input, and those are good ideas. In fact, our product management team is currently working on improving log collection for future versions, so ideas like this are very welcome. Would you be up to posting a new Idea thread with these details so it can be officially submitted as an enhancement request for  Product Management to review?