System dump

Before you report a problem, make sure to retrieve the necessary information from your cluster.

Tetragon’s bugtool captures potentially useful information about your environment for debugging. The tool is meant to be used for debugging a single Tetragon agent node but can be run automatically in a cluster. Note that in the context of Kubernetes, the command needs to be run from inside the Tetragon Pod’s container.

Key information collected by bugtool:

• Tetragon configuration
• Network configuration
• Kernel configuration
• eBPF maps
• Process traces (if tracing is enabled)

Automatic Kubernetes cluster sysdump

You can collect information in a Kubernetes cluster using the Cilium CLI:

cilium-cli sysdump

More details can be found in the Cilium docs. The Cilium CLI sysdump command will automatically run tetra bugtool on each nodes where Tetragon is running.

Manual single node sysdump

It’s also possible to run the bug collection tool manually with the scope of a single node using tetra bugtool.

Kubernetes installation

1. Identify the Tetragon Pod (<tetragon-namespace> is likely to be kube-system with the default install):

   kubectl get pods -n <tetragon-namespace> -l app.kubernetes.io/name=tetragon
   

2. Execute tetra bugtool within the Pod:

   kubectl exec -n <tetragon-namespace> <tetragon-pod-name> -c tetragon -- tetra bugtool
   

3. Retrieve the created archive from the Pod’s filesystem:

   kubectl cp -c tetragon <tetragon-namespace>/<tetragon-pod-name>:tetragon-bugtool.tar.gz tetragon-bugtool.tar.gz
   

Container installation

1. Enter the Tetragon Container:

   docker exec -it <tetragon-container-id> tetra bugtool
   

2. Retrieve the archive using docker cp:

   docker cp <tetragon-container-id>:/tetragon-bugtool.tar.gz tetragon-bugtool.tar.gz
   

Systemd host installation

1. Execute tetra bugtool with Elevated Permissions:

   sudo tetra bugtool
   

Enable debug log level

When debugging, it might be useful to change the log level. The default log level is controlled by the log-level option at startup:

• Enable debug level with --log-level=debug
• Enable trace level with --log-level=trace

Change log level on Kubernetes

It is possible to change the log level of Tetragon’s DaemonSet Pods by setting tetragon.debug to true.