Creating Custom Collectors

The contents of a support bundle is controlled by the list of custom collectors that are supplied. While there’s a lot of defaults, it’s recommended that you add to these and create a set of custom collectors to include application logs and specific data that’s useful when troubleshooting application-level problems.

Custom collectors are defined as a YAML document in the Vendor Portal, and promoted to release channels. For more information about how to promote, read the documentation on promoting collectors.

Collector Document

The simplest collector definition (defining no collectors), is:

collect:
  v1: []

Adding Collectors

To add custom collectors, start by appending each collector to the v1 array in the document above. A full list of available collector types is documented in the reference docs. Each collector supports various attributes, and these are documented on the collector reference page.

To illustrate how to use this, let’s add a custom collector spec that will include the logs from an api pod running in Kubernetes. This isn’t a single pod, but it’s a deployment with a label, and the support bundle should contain the logs from all replicas.

The command that could be executed manually to retrieve these logs is:

$ kubectl logs -l app=api

There’s a kubernetes-logs collector that we will use to add this same output to the support bundle. The collector spec is:

kubernetes.logs:
  output_dir: /kubernetes/api-pod-logs
  namespace: default
  pod_log_options:
    timestamps: true
    sinceSeconds: 1000000
    limitBytes: 1000000000
  list_options:
    labelSelector: app=api
  timeout_seconds: 30

(The details of those fields is out of the scope of this document, but are described in detail on the kubernetes-logs reference doc.

Appending this to the collector spec, we now have:

collect:
  v1:
    - kubernetes.logs:
        output_dir: /kubernetes/api-pod-logs
        namespace: default
        pod_log_options:
          timestamps: true
          sinceSeconds: 1000000
          limitBytes: 1000000000
        list_options:
          labelSelector: app=api
        timeout_seconds: 30

Additional collectors can be added the same way. There’s no limit to the number of collectors you can add.

Default spec

A good place to start is with our default spec, which is useful when troubleshooting a Replicated application. It’s recommended to add your own application specs to this.

The default spec can be found here.