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21.5. Configuring Centralized Crash Collection

You can set up ABRT so that crash reports are collected from multiple systems and sent to a dedicated system for further processing. This is useful when an administrator does not want to log into hundreds of systems and manually check for crashes found by ABRT. In order to use this method, you need to install the libreport-plugin-reportuploader plug-in (yum install libreport-plugin-reportuploader). See the following sections on how to configure systems to use ABRT's centralized crash collection.

21.5.1. Configuration Steps Required on a Dedicated System

Complete the following steps on a dedicated (server) system:
  1. Create a directory to which you want the crash reports to be uploaded to. Usually, /var/spool/abrt-upload/ is used (the rest of the document assumes you are using this directory). Make sure this directory is writable by the abrt user.

    The abrt user and group

    When the abrt-desktop package is installed, it creates a new system user and a group, both named abrt. This user is used by the abrtd daemon, for example, as the owner:group of /var/spool/abrt/* directories.
  2. In the /etc/abrt/abrt.conf configuration file, set the WatchCrashdumpArchiveDir directive to the following: 
    WatchCrashdumpArchiveDir = /var/spool/abrt-upload/
  3. Choose your preferred upload mechanism; for example, FTP or SCP. For more information on how to configure FTP, refer to Section 17.2, “FTP”. For more information on how to configure SCP, refer to Section 11.3.2, “Using the scp Utility”.
    It is advisable to check whether your upload method works. For example, if you use FTP, upload a file using an interactive FTP client: 
    ~]$ ftp
ftp> open SERVERNAME
Name: USERNAME
Password: PASSWORD
ftp> cd /var/spool/abrt-upload
250 Operation successful
ftp> put TESTFILE
ftp> quit
    Check whether TESTFILE appeared in the correct directory on the server system.
  4. The MaxCrashReportsSize directive (in the /etc/abrt/abrt.conf configuration file) needs to be set to a larger value if the expected volume of crash data is larger than the default 1000 MB.
  5. Consider whether you would like to generate a backtrace of C/C++ crashes.
    You can disable backtrace generation on the server if you do not wish to generate backtraces at all, or if you decide to create them locally on the machine where a problem occurred. In the standard ABRT installation, a backtrace of a C/C++ crash is generated using the following rule in the /etc/libreport/events.d/ccpp_events.conf configuration file: 
    EVENT=analyze_LocalGDB analyzer=CCpp
        abrt-action-analyze-core.py --core=coredump -o build_ids &&
        abrt-action-install-debuginfo-to-abrt-cache --size_mb=4096 &&
        abrt-action-generate-backtrace &&
        abrt-action-analyze-backtrace
    You can ensure that this rule is not applied for uploaded problem data by adding the remote!=1 condition to the rule.
  6. Decide whether you want to collect package information (the package and the component elements) in the problem data. Refer to Section 21.5.3, “Saving Package Information” to find out whether you need to collect package information in your centralized crash collection configuration and how to configure it properly.