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commands
Commands: Debug
The `consul debug` command monitors an agent to capture a record its actions according to defined durations and intervals.

Consul Debug

Command: consul debug

The consul debug command monitors a Consul agent for the specified period of time, recording information about the agent, cluster membership, and environment to an archive written to the current directory.

Providing support for complex issues encountered by Consul operators often requires a large amount of debugging information to be retrieved. This command aims to shortcut that coordination and provide a simple workflow for accessing data about Consul agent, cluster membership, and environment to enable faster isolation and debugging of issues.

This command requires an operator:read ACL token in order to retrieve the data from the target agent, if ACLs are enabled.

If the command is interrupted, as it could be given a long duration but require less time than expected, it will attempt to archive the current captured data.

Security and Privacy

By default, ACL tokens, private keys, and other sensitive material related to Consul is sanitized and not available in this archive. However, other information about the environment the target agent is running in is available in plain text within the archive.

It is recommended to validate the contents of the archive and redact any material classified as sensitive to the target environment, or use the -capture flag to not retrieve it initially.

Additionally, we recommend securely transmitting this archive via encryption or otherwise.

Usage

Usage: consul debug [options]

By default, the debug command will capture an archive at the current path for all targets for 5 minutes.

Command Options

  • -duration - Optional, the total time to capture data for from the target agent. Must be greater than the interval and longer than 10 seconds. Defaults to 5 minutes.

  • -interval - Optional, the interval at which to capture dynamic data, such as heap and metrics. Must be longer than 5 seconds. Defaults to 30 seconds.

  • -capture - Optional, can be specified multiple times for each capture target and will only record that information in the archive.

  • -output - Optional, the full path of where to write the directory of data and resulting archive. Defaults to the current directory.

  • -archive - Optional, if the tool show archive the directory of data into a compressed tar file. Defaults to true.

  • -since - Optional, can be used to capture information since a particular time in the past

API Options

@include 'http_api_options_client.mdx'

Capture Targets

The -capture flag can be specified multiple times to capture specific information when debug is running. By default, it captures all information.

Target Description
agent Version and configuration information about the agent.
host Information about resources on the host running the target agent such as CPU, memory, and disk.
members A list of all the WAN and LAN members in the cluster.
metrics Metrics from the in-memory metrics endpoint in the target, captured at the interval.
logs TRACE level logs for the target agent, captured for the duration.
pprof Golang heap, CPU, goroutine, and trace profiling. CPU and traces are captured for duration in a single file while heap and goroutine are separate snapshots for each interval. This information is not retrieved unless enable_debug is set to true on the target agent or ACLs are enabled and an ACL token with operator:read is provided.

Examples

This command can be run from any host with the Consul binary, but requires network access to the target agent in order to retrieve data. Once retrieved, the data is written to the specified path (defaulting to the current directory) on the host where the command runs.

By default the command will capture all available data from the default agent address on loopback for 2 minutes at 30 second intervals.

$ consul debug
...

In this example, the archive is collected from a different agent on the network using the standard Consul CLI flag to change the API address.

$ consul debug -http-addr=10.0.1.10:8500
...

The capture flag can be specified to only record a subset of data about the agent and environment.

$ consul debug -capture agent -capture host -capture logs
...

The duration of the command and interval of capturing dynamic information (such as metrics) can be specified with the -interval and -duration flags.

$ consul debug -interval=15s -duration=1m
...

To capture information since a particular time in past -since flag can be used.

$ consul debug -since 1h
...