Displaying the Console History for an Instance

You can capture and display recent serial console data for an instance. The data includes configuration messages that occur when the instance boots, such as kernel and BIOS messages, and is useful for checking the status of the instance or diagnosing and troubleshooting problems.

The console history captures up to a megabyte of the most recent serial console data for the specified instance. Note that the raw console data, including multi-byte characters, is captured.

The console history is a point-in-time record. To troubleshoot a malfunctioning instance using an interactive console connection, use a serial console connection or a VNC console connection.

Required IAM Policy

To use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you must be granted security access in a policy  by an administrator. This access is required whether you're using the Console or the REST API with an SDK, CLI, or other tool. If you get a message that you don't have permission or are unauthorized, verify with your administrator what type of access you have and which compartment  to work in.

For administrators: The policy in Let users launch compute instances includes the ability to manage console history data. If the specified group doesn't need to launch instances or attach volumes, you could simplify that policy to include only manage instance-family, and remove the statements involving volume-family and virtual-network-family.

Tagging Resources

Apply tags to resources to help organize them according to business needs. Apply tags at the time you create a resource, or update the resource later with the wanted tags. For general information about applying tags, see Resource Tags.

Managing Console History Data

You can use the Console, CLI, or API to manage console history captures. Console history lets you see serial output from your instance without having to connect to the instance remotely. You can use this information to troubleshoot instance access issues.

Using the Console

On the instance details page in the Console, you can capture and download console histories, view and edit metadata details, and delete console history captures.

Using the CLI

For information about using the CLI, see Command Line Interface (CLI). To manage the serial console logs using the CLI, open a command prompt and run any of the following commands.

Note

When using the CLI to capture the instance's serial console data history, include the following option to ensure that full history is captured. Without this option, the data might be truncated: --length 10000000.

Using the API

For information about using the API and signing requests, see REST API documentation and Security Credentials. For information about SDKs, see SDKs and the CLI.

Use the following API operations to manage the console history data.