Chapter 21. Supportability and Maintenance

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 includes the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) 2.1, which features an improved user interface and the ability to send μReports, lightweight anonymous problem reports suitable for machine processing, such as gathering crash statistics. The set of supported languages, for which ABRT is capable of detecting problems, has been extended with the addition of Java and Ruby in ABRT 2.1.

In order to use ABRT, ensure that the abrt-desktop or the abrt-cli package is installed on your system. The abrt-desktop package provides a graphical user interface for ABRT, and the abrt-cli package contains a tool for using ABRT on the command line. You can also install both.

To install the package containing the graphical user interface for ABRT, run the following command as the root user:

~]# yum install abrt-desktop

~]# yum install abrt-desktop

To install the package that provides the command line ABRT tool, use the following command:

~]# yum install abrt-cli

~]# yum install abrt-cli

Note that while both of the above commands cause the main ABRT system to be installed, you may need to install additional packages to obtain support for detecting crashes in software programmed using various languages. See the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) chapter of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 System Administrator's Guide for information on additional packages available with the ABRT system.

Upon installation, the abrtd daemon, which is the core of the ABRT crash-detecting service, is configured to start at boot time. You can use the following command to verify its current status:

~]$ systemctl is-active abrtd.service
active

~]$ systemctl is-active abrtd.service
active

In order to discover as many software bugs as possible, administrators should configure ABRT to automatically send reports of application crashes to Red Hat. To enable the autoreporting feature, issue the following command as root:

~]# abrt-auto-reporting enabled

~]# abrt-auto-reporting enabled