System reports

System reports, also known as crashinfo files, contain information used by Cisco technical support representatives to debug problems that cause the Cisco IOS image to crash.

Collecting critical crash information quickly and reliably is essential, so the system bundles the data in a format that is easily associated with a specific crash event. System reports are generated and saved in the '/core' directory, either on the harddisk: or flash: filesystem. The system does not generate reports when a reload occurs.

These details are collected in case of a system crash:

  1. Full process core
  2. IOSd core file and IOS crashinfo file if there was an IOSd process crash
  3. Tracelogs
  4. System process information
  5. Bootup logs
  6. Certain types of /proc information

This report is generated before the router goes down to rommon/bootloader. The system stores the information in separate files, then archives and compresses them into a tar.gz bundle. This process makes it convenient to access a complete crash snapshot in one location. The tar.gz file can also be transferred off the device for analysis.

The file name embeds the device hostname, the ID of the module that generated the system report, and the creation timestamp.

<hostname>_<moduleID>-system-report_<timestamp>.tar.gz

Sample system report

See this sample report with the file name Router1_RP_0-system-report_20210204-163559-UTC

In this example, a device with the hostname Router1 experienced an unexpected reload of the RP0 module, and the system report was generated on February 4, 2021, at 4:39:59 PM UTC. 

├── bootflash/
│   └── pd_info/
│       ├── dmesg_output-20210204-163538-UTC.log
│       ├── filesystems-20210204-163538-UTC.log
│       ├── memaudit-20210204-163538-UTC.log
│       ├── proc_cpuinfo-20210204-163538-UTC.log
│       ├── proc_diskstats-20210204-163538-UTC.log
│       ├── proc_interrupts-20210204-163538-UTC.log
│       ├── proc_oom_stats-20210204-163538-UTC.log
│       ├── proc_softirqs-20210204-163538-UTC.log
│       ├── system_report_trigger.log
│       └── top_output-20210204-163538-UTC.log
├── harddisk/
│   ├── core/
│   │   └── Router1_RP_0_hman_17716_20210212-123836-UTC.core.gz
│   └── tracelogs/ 
├── tmp/
│   ├── fp/
│   │   └── trace/
│   ├── maroon_stats/
│   ├── rp/
│   │   └── trace/
│   └── Router1_RP_0-bootuplog-20210204-163559-UTC.log
└── var/
    └── log/
        └── audit/
            └── audit.log