Seeing a demo of Session Recording in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was an eye-opener for me because it may change the way we manage systems. Let's take a look at what you can do with session recording and where it comes in handy for troubleshooting.
Session recording can help system administrators track and trace system changes. For example, when there is a system upgrade or update, the command lines and output can be recorded accurately with no copy-and-paste needed, or when an issue happens, the recording can be played back to navigate to the root cause.
It can also be useful to troubleshoot an issue in daily operations. Due to some limitations (e.g. network), a remote session or assistance may be not feasible at that moment. In this case, we can follow these steps to use session recording to get additional help:
-
Commands to execute are sent to a system administrator by an expert.
-
The administrator enables session recording and runs the commands.
-
The administrator exports session recording and sends it back to the expert.
-
The expert plays back the session and troubleshoots.
Now, let’s see how to export a session. First, please make sure the Web Console (cockpit) and session recording packages have been installed. To do that, run rpm -aq | egrep 'tlog|cockpit-session-recording'
with sudo
or as root. You should see output like this:
If any of the packages are missing, please follow the guide from Getting started with session recording in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta to install them. Additionally, please ensure the session recording is enabled. Those steps are also in the getting started post.
By default, the data of session recordings is written to the journal. But the system cleans up the journal at reboot. Therefore, to save the old recordings, you need to set persistent storages for the systemd journal.
Refer to How to enable persistent logging for the systemd journal.
We also need the package systemd-journal-remote to save journal entries to a file with journal format. To install the package, use yum install systemd-journal-remote
as root.
After the above steps, it is ready to record a CLI session. First, login as a user and run some commands for recording. When logged in, you should be able to see the warning message:
When finished, you can run the below command to export the whole journal file with the systemd-journal-remote command which was just installed:
# journalctl -o export | /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journal-remote -o /tmp/example.journal -
Note: please notice there is a hyphen mark (-
) at the end of the command.
With the export file, you need to copy the journal file to another server and put it under /var/log/journal
. Go to the Web Console and enter session recording. There you can see the session recording from the server.
From the highlighted area, you can see the session is recorded for user “edward” on host “rhel8beta”, and the detailed time range. By clicking the recording, you could enter the selected recording to play it.
In the above journal file, it will include all the session recordings. So, if you would like to have a specific session recording only, you can do that by specifying a TLOG_REC ID
. First, use one of the below three methods which is convenient to you to find out the session ID:
Method 1: Search keyword "rec" to navigate session ID:
# journalctl -o verbose | grep -i \"rec\"
Method 2: Search user ID of tlog to navigate the session ID
# id tlog # journalctl -xe -o json-pretty _UID=<User ID of tlog>
Method 3: Find the session ID from the Web Console
With the session ID, export the specific journal entries of the session to a journal file:
# journalctl -o export TLOG_REC=<Session ID> | /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journal-remote -o /tmp/example.journal -
Next, you can directly play the session back from the file via CLI. The session ID is still required when running the below command:
# tlog-play -r journal --file-path=/tmp/example.journal -M TLOG_REC=<Session ID>
As a summary, please see an example about how to export a session with session ID, and play it back from a journal file:
# journalctl -o export TLOG_REC=84ff48bed23944c78bb252edfc1e0815-3bc8-10572ba | /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-journal-remote -o /tmp/example.journal -
# tlog-play -r journal --file-path=/tmp/example.journal -M TLOG_REC=84ff48bed23944c78bb252edfc1e0815-3bc8-10572ba
A little tip here is that the content on the player screen is available to select and copy. Then, you can paste it anywhere is needed. Isn’t that convenient?
That is how to work with session recording in RHEL 8, which is a new feature in RHEL 8. It can be helpful for system administrators and support engineers especially. They can ask a user or customer to record their sessions, reproduce the problem and then export the recorded session to send to an expert or attach to a support case in order to solve.
À propos de l'auteur
Contenu similaire
Parcourir par canal
Automatisation
Les dernières nouveautés en matière d'automatisation informatique pour les technologies, les équipes et les environnements
Intelligence artificielle
Actualité sur les plateformes qui permettent aux clients d'exécuter des charges de travail d'IA sur tout type d'environnement
Cloud hybride ouvert
Découvrez comment créer un avenir flexible grâce au cloud hybride
Sécurité
Les dernières actualités sur la façon dont nous réduisons les risques dans tous les environnements et technologies
Edge computing
Actualité sur les plateformes qui simplifient les opérations en périphérie
Infrastructure
Les dernières nouveautés sur la plateforme Linux d'entreprise leader au monde
Applications
À l’intérieur de nos solutions aux défis d’application les plus difficiles
Programmes originaux
Histoires passionnantes de créateurs et de leaders de technologies d'entreprise
Produits
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
- Red Hat OpenShift
- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
- Services cloud
- Voir tous les produits
Outils
- Formation et certification
- Mon compte
- Assistance client
- Ressources développeurs
- Rechercher un partenaire
- Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog
- Calculateur de valeur Red Hat
- Documentation
Essayer, acheter et vendre
Communication
- Contacter le service commercial
- Contactez notre service clientèle
- Contacter le service de formation
- Réseaux sociaux
À propos de Red Hat
Premier éditeur mondial de solutions Open Source pour les entreprises, nous fournissons des technologies Linux, cloud, de conteneurs et Kubernetes. Nous proposons des solutions stables qui aident les entreprises à jongler avec les divers environnements et plateformes, du cœur du datacenter à la périphérie du réseau.
Sélectionner une langue
Red Hat legal and privacy links
- À propos de Red Hat
- Carrières
- Événements
- Bureaux
- Contacter Red Hat
- Lire le blog Red Hat
- Diversité, équité et inclusion
- Cool Stuff Store
- Red Hat Summit