Simple CLI for setting up a system to collect core dumps and push to GCS

There are 2 main commands

• crash_reporter initialize
• crash_reporter collect

initialize

Sets up the host system to call crash_reporter when ever a core is produced.

Initialize will copy the crash_reporter binary to the path specified in the arguments. You can also pass --collectArgs flag to initialize which is a string of arguments to be passed to the collect comand when a core dump occurs.

This uses the core linux command. So /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern will be set to:

|/path/to/crash_reporter collect <collectArgs>

Note: The core_pattern file has a limit of 128 bytes so keep file paths short and consider specifying a --config file to pass to the collect command.

collect

This command reads in a core dump from stdin and persists it either locally or to a GCS bucket. You can specify a yaml file with options for the collect command.

bucket: your-gcs-bucket
gcs: /tmp/gcp_credentials.json
sink: gcs
out: /crash_dumps

A full description of the flags can be seen by running crash_reporter collect -h

Future work

Set up this CLI as a Kubernetes daemon set, to monitor and watch pods and services within a cluster and capture any core dumps.