Server logs

This page describes how to access server logs for HCP Consul Dedicated clusters. After you access an HCP Consul Dedicated cluster, you can use the CLI to view the logs for individual clusters.

For information on accessing a server's audit logs to monitor API calls, refer to audit logs.

Prerequisites

Accessing server logs requires the Consul CLI. If you do not have access to the CLI on your workstation, download and install Consul.

Accessing server logs also requires the server's address and an admin token for the HCP Consul Dedicated cluster. For instructions on accessing this information, refer to Access HCP Consul Dedicated clusters.

View server logs

The process to view an individual server's logs consists of the following steps:

Use the cluster DNS address to resolve the IP addresses for the individual Consul servers.
For each server, run consul monitor in a separate terminal.

Resolve server addresses

Run nslookup or a similar tool to resolve the DNS address to individual server IPs. The lookup succeeds for both private and public clusters, but the IPs for private clusters are not routable from your workstation unless you are within your corporate VPN or on a jump server.

Update the following command to include the HCP Consul Dedicated server's DNS address.

$ nslookup consul-cluster-name.consul.alphanumeric-id.aws.hashicorp.cloud

Server:     192.168.1.254
Address:    192.168.1.254#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   consul-cluster-name.consul.alphanumeric-id.aws.hashicorp.cloud
Address: 172.25.22.78
Name:   consul-cluster-name.consul.alphanumeric-id.aws.hashicorp.cloud
Address: 172.25.27.214
Name:   consul-cluster-name.consul.alphanumeric-id.aws.hashicorp.cloud
Address: 172.25.17.212

Access server logs

Turn off SSL verification and run consul monitor on an individual server's IP address to output server logs to the terminal. You must disable SSL verification because the certificate for the servers is only valid for the domain name, not the individual IP address. In most cases you can use the domain name to interact with the server, but in this specific case you must make requests to each individual IP.

Update the following command to include your server address and a valid admin token:

$ CONSUL_HTTP_SSL_VERIFY=false consul monitor \
  -http-addr https://172.25.22.78 \ 
  -token <your-token-here>

You can also add the -log-level flag to specify a log level. The default log level is info. Available log levels are trace, debug, info, warn, and error.

It may take a minute or two for the logs to appear in the terminal. A known issue causing this delay was fixed in the following Consul versions:

v1.15.2
v1.14.6
v1.13.7