I’m a senior developer and 3th level support engineer for a Linux based appliance system for a few years now. When I started in this position, I couldn’t believe how customer technical support was handled (an eternal send me the output of this command, email-cycle. Every ticket lasted weeks open.) so I built a script to collect diagnostic data and a web interface to exploit the data and share it with the team. It improved the support service dramatically from weeks to hours.
At that time I didn’t know about sos command (it was called sosreport back then) but it was very much the same concept. Based on that experience, I soon realized that a tool capable of managing, sharing and analyzing sosreports was missing, so I built one without me realizing how little known the sos command is through the Linux community. So I wrote this article hoping to pick-up your curiosity and encourage people to take advantage of the sos command.
If you make a living by troubleshooting or diagnosing Linux systems whether in large production environments, or in small business with desktop computers, I think that you will find this article extremely useful.
In this article, I provide a comprehensive overview of the sos command and its many features and at the end I will tell you why is so important to have it in your list of tools.
To keep the article concise and easy to read, I limited the depth of each topic and include only brief examples where appropriate but provide links to other articles if you’d like to dive deeper on a specific feature.
Hope you'll find this article useful and interesting.
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