Introduction
In this article I will explain how to find, read and export the desktone.log file on VMware Horizon DaaS 8.0
How to tail the Desktone.log file via SSH
Connect to one of the Service Provider appliances using your your favorite SSH client.
Find the Link-Local IP address of the Tenant appliance
- Initiate a SSH connection from the Service Provider appliance to the Tenant appliance
- Gain sudo rights on the Tenant appliance
- The Desktone password is the same password as the Desktone password on the Service Provider appliances
- Type command “tail -f /var/log/desktone/desktone.log“
- You will now have a live view on the desktone.log file
How to export the Desktone.log files from the Tenant appliances
If you’re not looking for a live overview, and you want to examine some historic logs you need to Export the old Desktone.log files to your PC.
When you do this, you can open multiple files and look for issues with a single search command.
First we need to export the Desktone.log files from the Tenant appliances:
- Navigate to the Horizon DaaS Service Center
- Browse to Appliances > Browse Appliances in the menu
- Select the tenant and datacenter from the list and choose Search
- Look for the primary appliance of the Tenant and choose Actions
- Navigate to the second tab Actions
- Choose Download Logs
- Depending on the size of the logs it can take a couple of minutes to gather all logs.
- When finished a pop-up will invite you to download a .ZIP file
- Inside the .ZIP file you will find a new .ZIP file for each Tenant appliance
- Extract the .ZIP file somewhere
- Navigate to the Desktone folder
- The most recent Desktone log is direct available
- The rest of the files need to be unzipped first
- Now you can open them all using Notepad ++
- Now you find all log entries matching your search criteria using the option
Do you want to know more about Horizon DaaS, read our Horizon DaaS our Horizon DaaS 8.0 series
Thanks for the in-depth explanation!
Good article. When troubleshooting operations – like user login issues or connectivity to AD – there are a couple of notes to consider:
> When looking for anything in particular, remember the logs are kept in UTC time – so keep timezone differences in mind. Do NOT change the timezone on the appliances.
> The appliances are in pairs and run in active-active mode. You should best open two SSH (e.g. Putty) windows and connect to the 169.254.x.x address of both appliances, then run the tail command to check what happens on both simultaneously.
> When looking for errors you might want to pipe and grep the output for keywords like ERROR or username:
tail -f /var/log/desktone/desktone.log | grep ERROR
> You might opt for automatic downloading of logs using an additional server like a Nagios Log server – which would need to be able to connect to the same network.
Thanks for your comment, I will add your feedback to the steps in the post.