Viewing and collecting critical logs by using the Kibana dashboard

BMC supports the Kibana dashboard to view and collect the critical logs after you deploy BMC Helix Service Management. 

Before you begin

Make sure that you have deployed the BMC Helix Service Management and Elasticsearch-Fluentbit-Kibana (EFK). For more information, see the topic Installing.

To set up the Kibana dashboard

1. On the BMC Deployment Engine, run the following command:

   kubectl get svc -n <BMC Helix Logging namespace>

   For example:

   kubectl get svc -n bmc-helix-logging

2. In the command output, find the Kibana service EXTERNAL-IP and PORT values.
   For example:

   NAME                                      TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP     PORT(S)
   elasticsearch-logging-kibana              ClusterIP   10.43.171.166   172.20.93.195   5601/TCP
   
   
3. Access Kibana by using an URL with the following format:
   http://<EXTERNAL-IP>:<PORT>
   The Kibana home page appears on the screen.
   
4. Click Explore on my own.
5.  In the Visualize and Explore Data section, select Discover.
6. On the Create index panel, type helix-* to display a list of index patterns and click Next step.
   For example, if your namespace is ade-poc, enter ade-poc* in the panel.
   
7. (Optional) On the Configure settings panel, in the Time Filter field name, select @timestamp.
8. Click Create index pattern.
   The index pattern is created successfully.

To view the logs

After you create the index pattern, navigate to the Discover tab by clicking the  icon. You can see the critical logs listed in the Discover tab.

Expand each log file to view the details of the logs.

The following fields are present in each log file:

The following video demonstrates the process of setting up the Kibana dashboard and to view the logs: 

List of critical logs

The following table lists the components and their respective critical logs that can be accessed by using Kibana: