Troubleshooting with VMware NSX ALB/Avi Vantage

calendar May 22, 2021 · 2 min read · Load Balancing VMWare Avi NSX-ALB  ·
Share on: linkedin copy

NSX Advanced Load Balancer - Logging and Troubleshooting Cheat Sheet

Load Balancer Icon

Get into the OS Shell (all elements)

1sudo su

Controller Log Locations

Note: Everything in /var/lib/avi/logs is managed by Elasticsearch. I wouldn't mess with it.

Events published to the GUI: /var/lib/avi/logs/ALL-EVENTS/

The primary log directory for Avi Vantage Controllers is /opt/avi/log. As this feeds into Elasticsearch, they have file outputs for every severity level. An easy way to get data on a specific object would be to build a grep statement like this:

1grep {{ regex }} /opt/avi/log/{{ target }}
  • alert_notifications_*: Summarized problems log. Events are in a json format!

Troubleshooting Deployment Failures

  • avi-nsx.*: Presumably for NSX-T integration. further investigation required
  • cloudconnectorgo.*: Avi's cloud connector is pretty important given their architecture. This is where you can troubleshoot any issues getting a cloud turned up, or any initial provisioning issues.
  • vCenter*: vCenter write mode activity logs. Look here for SE deployment failures in a traditional vSphere cloud.

Service Engines

Troubleshooting

Checking the Routing Table

NSX ALB / Avi uses FRRouting (7.0 as of release 20.1) over network namespaces to achieve management/data plane separation and VRF-Lite. To access the data plane, you will need to change namespaces! Unlike NSX-T, this doesn't happen over docker namespaces. This means that the follow commands work in both as root:

  • Show all VRF+Namespaces ip netns show
  • Send a one-shot command to the namespace: ip netns exec {{ namespace }} {{ command }} Example: ip netns exec 'ip route show'
  • Start a shell in the desired namespace: ip netns exec {{ namespace }} {{ shell }} Example: ip netns exec avi_ns1 bash

After in the bash shell, all normal commands apply as if there was no namespace/VRF.

For more information on Linux Network Namespaces, here's a pretty good guide: https://www.opencloudblog.com/?p=42

Logging

All SE logging is contained in /var/lib/avi/log. Here are the significant log directories there:

  • IMPORTANT! bgp: This is where all the routing protocol namespace logging from FRRouting lands.
  • traffic: This one's pretty touch to parse and it's better to use Avi's Elasticsearch instead.

Conclusion

Avi Vantage has a pretty solid logging schema, but is very much a growing product. These logs will eventually be exposed more fully to the GUI/API, but for now it's handy to grep away. I'll be updating this list as I find more.