How do I capture logging events from ItemSense?

Table of Contents

Why we need the Logs and Configurations

ItemSense is made up of three different components. There is the IMC, the ItemSense Core and the Reader Agent. From communicating with readers and gateways and monitoring health, to managing jobs, storing tag reports and exposing tag data via the HTTP REST API, ItemSense Core is the brain of ItemSense.  ItemSense Core communicates with readers and gateways via an on-reader component called the Reader Agent.

The ItemSense Core and Reader Agent components document what is happening in their log files.These log files provide valuable insight when troubleshooting an issue.

In addition to log files, ItemSense configuration information is needed to fully understand the context of the log file entries.  There are a few additional pieces of information to understand about these logs and configurations that the following sections discuss.

ItemSense Core Log Files

     The ItemSense logs are spread out in multiple locations and represent multiple subsystems:

        - Coordinator
        - ItemSense API Service
        - Reader Data Engine
        - IMC
        - nginx
        - rabbitmq

Reader Agent Log Files

     The Reader Agent Logs contain information related to the health, connection, configuration, and tag publishing of a reader or gateway.

Note: Time is of the essence for the Reader Agent Logs since they tend to cycle when jobs are running.  If you can get those logs within the hour of the issue, it is likely the logs will have what we need.

ItemSense Configurations

     The ItemSense Configurations will contain the details for the following objects:

          - Jobs
          - Reader Definitions
          - Reader Configuration
          - Recipes
          - Thresholds
          - Users
          - Zone Maps
          - Zones

Grab the ItemSense Server Logs through the IMC

1. Visit http://<ItemSense server hostname/ip address>:3010/ with an Internet Browser.

      - Note: You will need to replace "<ItemSense Server Hostname or IP Address>" with your specific ItemSense Server Hostname or IP Address. 

 

2. Login with the appropriate user credentials

3. After you login, you will see the reader definition page.

 

4. Click the 'More' button at the top right of the dashboard.

5. Select the "Download Logs" option, and make sure to switch to the "ItemSense Logs" tab:

6. Specify the appropriate "From" time that occurs before the issue you are experiencing.

7. Specify the appropriate "To" time that occurs after the issue you are experiencing.

8.Check "Include auxiliary service logs"

9. Click the "Download" button

10. If you get the following message, then click the "Save" button

You will now have the ItemSense Server logs stored in a tarball on your machine in the Downloads folder. 

Note: If IMC access is limited and you need to grab the logs via SSH, the following directories are where the logs are stored. This way, you could grab piece by piece and download smaller portions if network connection is intermittent. We advise downloading the full directory, so that we have all the data possible to troubleshoot. The file locations are:

Coordinator Logs - ~/containers/itemsense/home/itemsense/Coordinator/var/output/logs
Reader Data Engine Logs - ~/containers/itemsense/home/itemsense/var/output/logs
API Service Logs - ~/containers/itemsense/home/itemsense/ItemSenseAPIService/var/output/logs
IMC Logs -~/containers/itemsense/var/log/impinj
Web Proxy (Nginx) Logs - ~/containers/nginx/var/log/nginx

It is possible to download the logs using the endpoints of the ItemSense API. On the server itself, you could run the following command to create a tarball of the logs, just as the IMC would do through the browser. Please note, we have specified the default user and password, so you may need to adjust those in the curl command:

curl -v http://admin:admindefault@127.0.0.1/itemsense/support/v1/logs?extended=true

This API command is noted in our developer portal here: https://developer.impinj.com/itemsense/docs/2018r2/api/

 

Grab the Reader/Gateway System Logs 

If the issue you are experiencing is related to a Reader/Gateway, please follow the instructions here:

    https://support.impinj.com/hc/en-us/articles/202756238-How-do-I-capture-logging-events-from-my-reader-

Grab the Reader Agent Logs Through the IMC

The easiest way to get the reader agent logs, is through the IMC. To do so, follow steps 1-4 listed above in the section "Grab the ItemSense Server Logs through the IMC". After that, please follow the following steps:

1. Select the "Download Logs" button from the "More" dropdown, but make sure to select the "Reader Logs" tab instead of the "ItemSense Logs".

2. You will need to click the "Collect Logs" button as shown below:

3. The interface will prompt you to wait until the downloads are ready. It will take more time if you have a large number of readers provisioned. After it completes, you should see the a list of readers which logs are available for download from, with the prompt to 'Download Logs' at the bottom:

Grab the Reader Agent Logs Through the Manual Process

If unable to access the ItemSense server through the IMC, please grab the Reader Agent Logs as well using the following instructions:

       Note: For this exercise, FileZilla (https://filezilla-project.org/) will be used to transfer the files off of the reader.

Enable FTP on the reader

Open putty and ssh to your reader by entering the reader's IP address or name if it's been given a DNS name on your network.

Click the "Open" button.

Login to the reader with the appropriate username and password.

Type the following to enable ftp:

    config network ftp enable

The output should look something like:

Keep your putty session open

FTP the Reader Agent Log files off the Reader/Gateway

FTP to the reader by entering the host name, username, password, and port (21) then click "Quickconnect"

Navigate to folder /mnt/spp/log

       

Select all files and transfer them to your machine in the same location (Downloads folder).as the other log files.

Disable FTP on the reader

Reusing the open putty session from before, type the following to disable ftp:

      config network ftp disable

The output should look something like:

Acquiring ItemSense Configurations

Open an Internet Browser

Visit https://<ItemSense Server Hostname or IP Address>/itemsense/support/v1/configuration

      - Note: You will need to replace "<ItemSense Server Hostname or IP Address>" with your specific ItemSense Server Hostname or IP Address. 

Enter the credentials for an Admin account.

This will make the browser download a tarball file (e.g. itemsense-configuration-2018-03-02-6-16.tar.gz) into the Downloads folder.

Send Impinj all of the files you acquired

Please send files larger than 25MB to the following link:

      https://spaces.hightail.com/uplink/ImpinjSupport

When uploading files, please include the support ticket number that this information pertains to.