1장. Generating an sos report for technical support

An sos report is a common starting point for Red Hat technical support engineers when performing analysis of a service request for a RHEL system. The sos utility (also known as sosreport) provides a standardized way to collect diagnostic information that Red Hat support engineers can reference throughout their investigation of issues reported in support cases. Using the sos utility helps to ensure that you are not repeatedly asked for data output.

The sos utility allows to collect various debugging information from one or more systems, optionally clean sensitive data, and upload it in a form of a report to Red Hat. More specifically, the three sos components do the following:

The information collected in a report contains configuration details, system information, and diagnostic information from a RHEL system, such as:

The sos utility writes the data it collects to an archive named sosreport-<host_name>-<support_case_number>-<YYYY-MM-DD>-<unique_random_characters>.tar.xz.

The utility stores the archive and its SHA-256 checksum in the /var/tmp/ directory:

[root@server1 ~]# ll /var/tmp/sosreport*
total 18704
-rw-------. 1 root root 19136596 Jan 25 07:42 sosreport-server1-12345678-2022-01-25-tgictvu.tar.xz
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root       65 Jan 25 07:42 sosreport-server1-12345678-2022-01-25-tgictvu.tar.xz.sha256