This post is co-written by Satyajit Desai and Raja Tamilarasan
Are you an IT Admin? Do you manage your organization’s Data Center? If yes, continue reading for some great news that’s going to save you time. As a system admin, you must have come across a situation where you have a machine that’s down and a teammate who says “I don’t know what happened but the machine doesn’t work any longer”. You would then start playing twenty questions to figure out what happened to the system . Instead, what if the machine could tell you exactly what happened before the failure?
Introduction to Lifecycle Logs
Starting with the 11th generation of Dell PowerEdge servers, the iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller provides a feature called Lifecycle Logs which records every action performed on the server. This information can be viewed locally or remotely through various GUI based consoles as well as iDRAC supported command line interfaces.
To access the Lifecycle Logs on a 12th generation PowerEdge server, browse to the iDRAC web GUI and login. In the Tree view, click on Server, select the Logs tab then click on Lifecycle Log. From here, you can immediately see the most recent server events. If you like, you can find particular entries by using the Log Filter feature.
Below are snapshots of the Lifecycle Log entries:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The various types of information available in the Lifecycle Log are listed below.
1. Information about replaced parts.
2. Information about firmware changes due to an upgrade or downgrade
3. Information about failed parts.
4. Temperature warnings
5. Configuration changes on the system hardware components.
As seen in the snapshots above, the Lifecycle logs also provide detailed timestamps, severity, recommended actions and some other technical information that could come very handy for tracking or alert purposes. To learn more about different types of messages that are logged as part of Lifecycle Logs, refer here.
Dell is listening to the customers and making improvements to its iDRAC and Lifecycle Controller embedded server management portfolio. To learn about some of the other cool features supported by Dell’s iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller solution, refer here.
Clik here to view.
