server outage - which logs are relevant?

[Hal Burgiss]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Dave Stevens <geek at uniserve.com> wrote:

> > What is unresponsive about the server?
>
> doesn't serve web pages
>
>
Well, I can't see why the apache logs would be useful?

I would check /var/log/syslog and /var/log/kern.log. If there is nothing
useful there, and you don't have any special process accounting type stuff
set up, you probably won't have any useful logging.

My experience with many, many of these is that more often than not useful
logging does not happen. Why? A crash is often because something unexpected
happened, and its hard to log stuff you don't expect and don't know will
happen in the future. And once the bad sh*t happens, then its too late for
logging.  And if its that sporadic, it will be really hard to know if
whatever you try, is actually going to solve it. I find my systems will
occasionally spit out a bunch of memory errors just before a crash, but its
really difficult to tell what caused it. Or whether it might even be
hardware faults of the host system.

My personal suggestion is to see if whatever software is being used to
manage the VPS has any remote access stuff. I am on rackspace and they use
openstack. I have scripts run from cron that check mine, and after some
false positive checking, the script will remote reboot the system that is
not responding. Not ideal, but it helps eliminate the several hours of
downtime aspect.
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