ABRT is the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool. ABRT consists of a daemon, abrtd, which runs silently in the background most of the time. It springs into action when an application crashes, or a kernel oops is detected. The daemon then collects the relevant problem data such as a core file if there is one, the crashing application's command line parameters, and other data of forensic utility.

ABRT currently supports detection of crashes in applications written in the C/C++ and Python languages, as well as kernel oopses.

ABRT is capable of reporting problems to a remote issue tracker. Reporting can be configured to happen automatically whenever an issue is detected, or problem data can be stored locally, reviewed, reported, and deleted manually by a user. The reporting tools can send problem data to a Bugzilla database, a Red Hat Technical Support (RHTSupport) site, upload it using FTP/SCP, email it, or write it to a file.

The part of ABRT which handles already-existing problem data (as opposed to, for example, creation of new problem data) has been factored out into a separate project, libreport. The libreport library provides a generic mechanism for analyzing and reporting problems, and it is used by applications other than ABRT. However, ABRT and libreport operation and configuration is closely integrated. They are therefore discussed as one in this document.

The ABRT packages provide the following crucial components, among others: