Where are My Boundary Logs and How do I Share Them with HashiCorp Support? – HashiCorp Help Center

Table of Contents:

What are the Boundary Controller and Worker logs and Where Can I Find Them?
- Event Logging Configured
- Without Event Logging Configured
What are the Boundary Desktop Logs and Where Can I Find Them?
- Increase Log Verbosity
- Where Can I Find Them?

This guide aims to assist you in locating and collecting HashiCorp Boundary log outputs to facilitate the support issue troubleshooting workflow.

If you are uncertain about your Boundary logs, this guide will help you identify and share them with HashiCorp Technical Support Engineers while addressing Boundary-related issues.

What are the Boundary Controller and Worker logs and Where Can I Find Them?

Technical Support Engineers often request Boundary Controller and Worker logs as part of the troubleshooting process. It is extremely helpful if you provide these logs whenever relevant, particularly when opening a new support issue.

If you need to share Boundary Controller and Worker logs but are unsure about their location or format, please continue reading!

Event Logging Configured

If Event Logging is configured in your Boundary Controller or Worker, logs can be found at the path specified in the events stanza of your Boundary configuration file.

For example, based on the configuration below, Boundary Controller and Worker observation logs can be found at var/log/boundary, while other event logs will be sent to stderr.

events {
   observations_enabled = true
 sink {
   name = "obs-sink"
   description = "Observations sent to a file"
   event_types = ["observation"]
   format = "cloudevents-json"
   file {
     path = "/var/log/boundary"
     file_name = "events.ndjson"
        }
     }
}

Without Event Logging Configured

If Events is not configured in your Boundary configuration, logs will be available at standard output (stdout), with errors directed to standard error (stderr). On Linux distributions, the journald daemon automatically captures Boundary’s log output to the system journal, which is a common operational logging practice.

To access a Boundary server and retrieve only the Boundary-specific log entries from the system journal, you can issue a quick command. Assuming your Boundary service is named "Boundary," use the following command to retrieve those log entries:

$ journalctl -b --no-pager -u boundary

The output should extend back to the system's boot time and may also include restarts of Boundary.

If you see log lines prefixed with boundary[NNNN]: in the output from the above command, you have located the operational logs. You can package these logs to share in your support ticket.

A convenient command for doing this is:

sudo journalctl -b --no-pager -u <boundary-process-name> | gzip -9 > "$(hostname)-$(date +%Y-%m-%dT%H-%M-%SZ)-boundary.log.gz"

which result in a compressed log file in the /tmp directory named like this:

/tmp/ip-10-42-0-27-2018-10-15T17:06:49Z-Bboundary.log.gz

What are the Boundary Desktop Client Logs and Where Can I Find Them?

Technical Support Engineers often request Boundary Desktop Client logs as part of the troubleshooting process. It is extremely helpful if you provide these logs whenever relevant, especially when opening a new support issue.

If you need to share Boundary Desktop Client logs but are unsure about their location or format, please continue reading!

Understanding Boundary Desktop Client Logs

Boundary Desktop Client logs contain information about interactions between the Desktop Client and remote targets, such as the Boundary Controller, Workers, and Targets.

Increase Log Verbosity

To increase the log verbosity for the Boundary Desktop Client, you can set the BOUNDARY_DESKTOP_LOG_LEVEL to INFO, WARN, DEBUG, or ERROR when starting the client.

Please note that BOUNDARY_DESKTOP_LOG_LEVEL is only available for Boundary Desktop Client version 2.1.0 and later.

Example:

Linux: BOUNDARY_DESKTOP_LOG_LEVEL=debug ./boundary-desktop
MacOS: BOUNDARY_DESKTOP_LOG_LEVEL=debug ./Boundary.app/Contents/MacOS/Boundary
Windows: $env:BOUNDARY_DESKTOP_LOG_LEVEL='debug'; .\Boundary.exe

Where Can I Find Them?

Linux: ~/.config/Boundary/logs/desktop-client.log
MacOS: ~/Library/Logs/Boundary/desktop-client.log
Windows: $env:USERPROFILE\AppData\Roaming\Boundary\logs\desktop-client.log

Other resources:

Event Logging Product Documentation