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Troubleshooting ANTA

A couple of things to check when hitting an issue with ANTA:

flowchart LR
    A>Hitting an issue with ANTA] --> B{Is my issue <br >listed in the FAQ?}
    B -- Yes --> C{Does the FAQ solution<<br />works for me?}
    C -- Yes --> V(((Victory)))
    B -->|No| E{Is my problem<br />mentioned in one<<br />of the open issues?}
    C -->|No| E
    E -- Yes --> F{Has the issue been<br />fixed in a newer<br />release or in main?}
    F -- Yes --> U[Upgrade]
    E -- No ---> H((Follow the steps below<br />and open a Github issue))
    U --> I{Did it fix<br /> your problem}
    I -- Yes --> V
    I -- No --> H
    F -- No ----> G((Add a comment on the <br />issue indicating you<br >are hitting this and<br />describing your setup<br /> and adding your logs.))

    click B "../faq" "FAQ"
    click E "https://github.com/arista-netdevops-community/anta/issues"
    click H "https://github.com/arista-netdevops-community/anta/issues"
    style A stroke:#f00,stroke-width:2px

Capturing logs

To help document the issue in Github, it is important to capture some logs so the developers can understand what is affecting your system. No logs mean that the first question asked on the issue will probably be “Can you share some logs please?”.

ANTA provides very verbose logs when using the DEBUG level. When using DEBUG log level with a log file, the DEBUG logging level is not sent to stdout, but only to the file.

Danger

On real deployments, do not use DEBUG logging level without setting a log file at the same time.

To save the logs to a file called anta.log, use the following flags:

# Where ANTA_COMMAND is one of nrfu, debug, get, exec, check
anta -l DEBUG –log-file anta.log <ANTA_COMMAND>

See anta --help for more information. These have to precede the nrfu cmd.

Tip

Remember that in ANTA, each level of command has its own options and they can only be set at this level. so the -l and --log-file MUST be between anta and the ANTA_COMMAND. similarly, all the nrfu options MUST be set between the nrfu and the ANTA_NRFU_SUBCOMMAND (json, text, table or tpl-report).

As an example, for the nrfu command, it would look like:

anta -l DEBUG --log-file anta.log nrfu --enable --username username --password arista --inventory inventory.yml -c nrfu.yml text

ANTA_DEBUG environment variable

Warning

Do not use this if you do not know why. This produces a lot of logs and can create confusion if you do not know what to look for.

The environment variable ANTA_DEBUG=true enable ANTA Debug Mode.

This flag is used by various functions in ANTA: when set to true, the function will display or log more information. In particular, when an Exception occurs in the code and this variable is set, the logging function used by ANTA is different to also produce the Python traceback for debugging. This typically needs to be done when opening a GitHub issue and an Exception is seen at runtime.

Example:

ANTA_DEBUG=true anta -l DEBUG --log-file anta.log nrfu --enable --username username --password arista --inventory inventory.yml -c nrfu.yml text

Troubleshooting on EOS

ANTA is using a specific ID in eAPI requests towards EOS. This allows for easier eAPI requests debugging on the device using EOS configuration trace CapiApp setting UwsgiRequestContext/4,CapiUwsgiServer/4 to set up CapiApp agent logs.

Then, you can view agent logs using: 

bash tail -f /var/log/agents/CapiApp-*

2024-05-15 15:32:54.056166  1429 UwsgiRequestContext  4 request content b'{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "runCmds", "params": {"version": "latest", "cmds": [{"cmd": "show ip route vrf default 10.255.0.3", "revision": 4}], "format": "json", "autoComplete": false, "expandAliases": false}, "id": "ANTA-VerifyRoutingTableEntry-132366530677328"}'