Debug your network easily!
Couple of last weeks I was working hard to get the things as reliable as possible. For those debugging sessions (and huge thanks to all participating beta testers) we were forced to develop some tooling to help us with insight on what’s going on with the connected devices, clients and, sometimes, other networking equipment.
I am working with a number of cloud based tools for about a decade now and what I found especially frustrating in general was the fact that there is almost zero debugging tools and logging available. It is simply put like that the software you are using is a service and it is a vendor’s job to keep it running smoothly. I believe that this is the reason why a number of smart IT engineers are often hesitant to put the tings into the cloud. When you do it, you can certainly save a bunch of money on maintaining the systems but on the other hand, you will lose a great deal of control.
It is not a point of this post to judge wether it is good or bad. The idea behind was to show that the possibility to actually see what’s going on in the systems you are responsible for, even though they are provided “as a service” can save a lot of frustrations and often can lead to administrator self help better than any vendor’s support staff because only the local admin is often capable of considering all the connections as only he or she is aware of all the intricacies of local infractructure involved.
So from day one we were decided to provide as detailed insight into the systems as possible and do it the most convenient way. Some of you might remember that we already added the possibility to trigger remote tcpdump, which is quite unique feature.
The link above is the original announcement of this feature.
So out of similar reasons (we needed the tooling internally) we decided to implement another user facing feature — to get device’s system log and also the kernel log just by clicking a button directly from the web console. Of course that it is possible to get these information just by VPNing to customers’ site, ssh into the device and issue the “logread” or “dmesg” command and, if necessary to download it through the clipboard or maybe ftp to your local machine for further investigation.
But wait! Isn’t this the reason why one should use a better solution? Why use the cloud managed WiFi? Sure!
So there is much easier path:
- log into the console
- select network
- select access point and click Debug
- click either Get logread or Get dmesg
- wait couple of seconds
- look into the logging from the device
- optionally — click on the log to download it to your computer for further analysis.
We have some improvements of this in the works but anyway, hope that you will like it as it is now! If you have any other suggestions on what you would like to have to make your admin’s life easier, feel free to contact me at rob.h(a)altiwi.com!
Here are some screenshots:
