Mastering CloudForms Automation

Chapter 36. Log Analysis During Service Provisioning

The workflow of provisioning a virtual machine from a service catalog involves a request, an approval stage, several tasks, and multiple concurrently running state machines.

If we are curious to discover more about their interaction, we can follow this workflow by examining the log lines written to automation.log during the service provisioning operation. This can reveal some interesting details about the interleaving of the various operations and state machines.

For this example we’ve grepped for the Following.. Followed message pairs in automation.log on CloudForms 3.2 (the workflow is similar in CloudForms 4.0). The service provisioning request was from a nonadmin user in the Bit63Group_vm_user group, so we see some group-specific profile processing. For the brevity, service_template_provision is abbreviated to stp in the following outputs.

Initial Request

We see the initial automation request being created though the /System/Request/UI_PROVISION_INFO entry point:

Following /System/Request/UI_PROVISION_INFO Following /unknown/VM/Provisioning/Profile/Bit63Group_vm_user#get_domains Followed /unknown/VM/Provisioning/Profile/Bit63Group_vm_user#get_domains Followed /System/Request/UI_PROVISION_INFO Following /System/Event/request_created Following /System/Policy/request_created Following /System/Process/parse_provider_category Followed /System/Process/parse_provider_category Following /System/Policy/ \ ServiceTemplateProvisionRequest_created ...