Collect diagnostics

About diagnostics

The Portworx diagnostics bundle, known as diags, is a support bundle that provides all the necessary information for the Portworx support team to diagnose any problems in your cluster. It includes the following information:

• Portworx journal logs
• Output from common Portworx CLI commands that provide details about cluster, nodes, and volumes
• Basic information about the operating system of the worker nodes
• Stack and heap files of Portworx processes
• Alerts generated by the cluster
• Cores or traces from Portworx processes (if found)

Portworx automatically uploads the diags to Pure Storage's call home service, Pure1. This feature eliminates the need for manual work of uploading diags to support tickets, ultimately reducing the time required to resolve cluster issues.

Prerequisites

Outbound access to the internet to allow connection to Pure1

Enable Pure1 integration

note

In air-gapped clusters, telemetry is supported via a simple or traditional proxy that serves in HTTP mode. If you have a next-generation firewall acting as a proxy, or have a problem with the telemetry configuration, contact Portworx Support for assistance.

Pure1 integration includes two components: telemetry, which uploads diagnostics, and a metrics collector, which forwards real-time metrics to Pure1. Enabling telemetry adds a telemetry pod on each node for diagnostics upload and a metrics collector deployment that forwards Prometheus metrics to Pure1.

After enabling Pure1 integration, you can use Pure1 AI Copilot to interact with your Portworx storage clusters using natural language. For more information, see Portworx on Pure1 AI Copilot.

Fresh installs

Telemetry and the metrics collector are enabled by default for all new clusters when you generate a spec from Portworx Central. However, you can disable this functionality later in the StorageCluster spec.

With Portworx Operator version 25.5.2 or later, applying a StorageCluster with only telemetry.enabled: true automatically adds metricsCollector.enabled: true. As a result, the metrics collector is enabled.

note

• If you disabled telemetry during the installation of Portworx and want to enable it now, you must update the StorageCluster spec and restart the pods to load the updated configuration.
• If you use GitOps to manage your StorageCluster, include the metricsCollector.enabled: true field in your Git manifest so that the repository matches the actual cluster state.

Upgrades

When upgrading to Portworx Operator 23.3.0 or newer, the following conditions apply:

• Telemetry is enabled by default unless it is disabled in the StorageCluster spec or when the PX_HTTPS_PROXY variable is configured.
• If telemetry is already enabled and the PX_HTTPS_PROXY environment variable is set, then telemetry will be disabled. When this happens, a Kubernetes warning event is generated to notify you that telemetry will be disabled.
• When upgrading to Portworx Operator 25.5.2 or later with telemetry enabled, the Operator automatically adds the following to your StorageCluster spec:

  spec:
    monitoring:
      telemetry:
        enabled: true
        metricsCollector:
          enabled: true

  note

  If you use GitOps to manage your StorageCluster, include the metricsCollector.enabled: true field in your Git manifest so that the repository matches the actual cluster state.

Customize metrics collector

Starting with Portworx Operator 25.5.2, you can configure the metrics collector separately from other telemetry components.

The metrics collector requires telemetry to be enabled. When telemetry is enabled, the metrics collector is enabled by default. You can disable the metrics collector while keeping telemetry enabled, but you cannot enable the metrics collector without telemetry.

The telemetry metrics collector scrapes Prometheus metrics from Portworx pods, forwards these real-time metrics to Pure1 for monitoring and analytics, and provides data for Pure1 dashboards showing capacity, utilization, and performance trends.

Disable metrics collector while keeping telemetry enabled

When you disable the metrics collector, real-time metrics forwarding to Pure1 stops, which means Pure1 dashboards no longer display current metrics. However, diagnostics upload to Pure1 continues to work, and support functionality remains intact. Pure1 AI Copilot continues to function because it uses diagnostics data. Your own Prometheus monitoring solutions continue to work normally because Portworx continues exporting metrics locally.

StorageCluster

spec:
  monitoring:
    telemetry:
      enabled: true
      metricsCollector:
        enabled: false

This configuration disables real-time metrics forwarding to Pure1 while maintaining diagnostics upload for support purposes.

Use a custom image for the metrics collector

StorageCluster

spec:
  monitoring:
    telemetry:
      enabled: true
      metricsCollector:
        enabled: true
        image: "portworx/realtime-metrics:<version>"

This configuration allows you to deploy a specific image version for the metrics collector.

How to use diags with support tickets

To resolve a support case, you need to provide your cluster UUID to the Portworx support team. This allows them to retrieve your diags from Pure1 and diagnose the problem in your cluster.

Find your cluster's UUID

Run the following command to get your cluster UUID:

Kubernetes

kubectl get storagecluster -n <px-namespace>

NAME                                              CLUSTER UUID                           STATUS   VERSION           AGE
px-cluster-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-ec53d3ba5b39   xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-b2249dff3501   Online   01d934d_d03a058   26h

Openshift

oc get storagecluster -n <px-namespace>

NAME                                              CLUSTER UUID                           STATUS   VERSION           AGE
px-cluster-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-ec53d3ba5b39   xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-b2249dff3501   Online   01d934d_d03a058   26h

Collect diagnostics

Portworx diagnostics are collected primarily in two ways:

On-demand diagnostics

You can collect diagnostics either using the pxctl CLI or the PortworxDiag custom resource.

On-demand diagnostics using pxctl CLI

You can run diagnostics directly from the node using the pxctl CLI. The most commonly used command is:

/opt/pwx/bin/pxctl service diags -a

This command generates a diagnostics bundle on the node. If Pure1 telemetry is enabled, the bundle is automatically uploaded to Pure1.

On-demand diagnostics using PortworxDiag custom resource

note

The PortworxDiag custom resource is only available when using Portworx Enterprise 3.3.0 and Operator 25.2.0 or later.

The PortworxDiag custom resource allows you to collect diagnostics at the cluster level. When you create this resource, the Portworx Operator:

1. Creates temporary pods for diagnostics collection.
2. Collects node-level diagnostics and Portworx pod logs.
3. Stores the diagnostics bundle in the /var/cores directory.
4. Deletes the pods after the logs are collected.

The diagnostics bundle includes the following:

• Node diagnostics:
  • Output from pxctl service diags
  • Stack traces
  • Heap logs
• Pod diagnostics:
  • Logs from all Portworx pods
  • Pod YAML manifests

You can also specify the nodes and volumes for which you want to collect diagnostics. For more information, see PortworxDiag CRD.

To collect diagnostics:

1. Enable the spec.clusterDiags field in your StorageCluster CR spec.

   StorageCluster CR

   ...
   spec:
     clusterDiags:
       enabled: true
   ...

2. Create a PortworxDiag custom resource. For more information, see PortworxDiag CRD.

Portworx is installed in the portworx namespace by default. If you didn’t customize the namespace during installation, use portworx for the namespace field in the manifest. If you used a different namespace, replace <NAMESPACE> with your specific namespace.

Example:

PortworxDiag CR

apiVersion: portworx.io/v1
kind: PortworxDiag
metadata:
  name: cluster-diag-obj1
  namespace: <namespace> # Replace with your namespace; if default, use portworx
spec:
  portworx:
   generateCore: true
   podDiags: true
   nodes:
    all: true # You can either use `all: true` or specify IDs and/or labels by using the `ids` and/or `labels` fields.
    ids: []
    labels: {}
   volume:
    ids: []
    labels: {}

3. Apply the PortworxDiag custom resource.

kubectl apply -f <your-portworxdiag-resource>.yaml

Once diagnostics collection is complete, the status of the custom resource includes the name and path of each diagnostics tar file.

On crash

If a Portworx process runs into an issue on a node, it will automatically collect diagnostics. If Pure1 telemetry is enabled, the diagnostics bundle is automatically uploaded to Pure1.

Disable Pure1 integration

To disable the metrics collector and telemetry integration, add the following section in your StorageCluster spec:

StorageCluster CRD

...
spec:
  monitoring:
    telemetry:
      enabled: false 
...

This removes the telemetry container from the Portworx pod.

important

If you want to disable only the metrics collector while keeping telemetry active for diagnostics upload, refer to the Customize metrics collector section for more information.

See Generate a complete diagnostics package for the entire CLI syntax.