Collecting diagnostic information

This document describes how to collect information about a virtual machine (VM) instance by using a diagnostic tool. Use the information that the tools collects to help with basic troubleshooting before contacting Cloud Customer Care.

The tool does the following:

• Collects information only from the VM that you specify.

• Stores the information only in your project.

• Stores the information for 10 days in a Cloud Storage bucket, which, by default, only you can access.

Before sharing the collected information with Customer Care, do the following:

1. Review the information for confidential or personally identifiable information (PII).

2. Delete or mask the information as necessary.

Before you begin

• Compute Engine installs the diagnostic tool by default on public versions of Windows Server images later than v20190714. Otherwise, if your Windows Server image version is earlier than v20190714, or you are using a custom image, install the tool by using the googet install google-compute-engine-diagnostics command.
• If you haven't already, set up authentication. Authentication verifies your identity for access to Google Cloud services and APIs. To run code or samples from a local development environment, you can authenticate to Compute Engine by selecting one of the following options:

  Select the tab for how you plan to use the samples on this page:

  Console

  When you use the Google Cloud console to access Google Cloud services and APIs, you don't need to set up authentication.

  gcloud

  1. Install the Google Cloud CLI. After installation, initialize the Google Cloud CLI by running the following command:

     gcloud init

     If you're using an external identity provider (IdP), you must first sign in to the gcloud CLI with your federated identity.

  2. Set a default region and zone.

Diagnostic information collected from the VM

This diagnostic tool collects information about the following:

• Disks:

  • Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) object information about disks, partitions, and volumes

• Events:

  • Windows Events, including application events and system events

• Networks:

  • WMI object information about firewall rules, and output from ipconfig, netstat, nslookup, ping, route, and tracert

• Programs:

  • WMI object information about processes, scheduled tasks, services, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

• System:

  • WMI object information about users, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) settings by using the rdp_status.ps1 script, and output from bcdedit, driverquery, msinfo32, pnputil, and systeminfo, and memory dump logs

For detailed information about how Compute Engine collects this information, see the public GitHub repository.

Limitations

• You can only collect diagnostic information from VMs created based on Windows Server.

Required roles

To get the permissions that you need to run the diagnostic tool by using Google Cloud CLI, ask your administrator to grant you the Service Account Token Creator (roles/iam.serviceAccountTokenCreator) IAM role on your project. For more information about granting roles, see Manage access to projects, folders, and organizations.

You might also be able to get the required permissions through custom roles or other predefined roles.

To attach diagnostic information to a support case, you also need the Tech Support Editor (roles/cloudsupport.techSupportEditor) role.

Collecting diagnostic information from a VM

Run the diagnostic tool either directly from the VM, or remotely, by using the Google Cloud CLI.

Attach diagnostic information to a support case

If you have an open case with Cloud Customer Care, then you can attach diagnostic information directly to the case when you collect it. This option saves you from downloading the archive from Cloud Storage and attaching it to the case yourself.

The diagnostic information is attached to the case without a review step. If you need to review the information or remove confidential or personally identifiable information (PII) before you share it, then don't use this option. Instead, collect the information as described in Collecting diagnostic information from a VM, review the archive in Cloud Storage, and then attach it to the case.

Before you attach diagnostic information to a support case, make sure that:

• Your organization has a Customer Care plan that lets you create technical support cases (Standard, Enhanced, or Premium Support).
• You have the Tech Support Editor (roles/cloudsupport.techSupportEditor) role. If the case belongs to an organization, then you need the role on the organization.
• The Cloud Support API is enabled in the project.
• The case is open.

To attach diagnostic information to a support case, do the following:

1. Make sure that you have installed the alpha commands component:

   gcloud components install alpha
   

2. Run the gcloud alpha compute diagnose export-logs command with the --support-case flag:

   gcloud alpha compute diagnose export-logs INSTANCE_NAME \
       --zone=ZONE \
       --support-case=CASE_NUMBER
   

   Replace the following:

   • INSTANCE_NAME: the name of the Windows Server compute instance.
   • ZONE: the zone of the instance.
   • CASE_NUMBER: the number of an open support case.

   The command checks that the case exists and that you can add attachments to it before it starts collecting. It then waits for the instance to finish collecting diagnostic information, which might take a few minutes, and uploads the archive to the case. The archive also stays in the Cloud Storage bucket, the same as when you omit the --support-case flag.

What's next

• Learn how to capture screenshots from VMs.

• Learn how to Troubleshoot Windows instances.

• Learn how to Troubleshoot RDP.