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How to Tail & View Cloud Manager Build Logs for AEM as a Cloud Service and AMS


If you are using the Adobe Experience Manager Cloud Service (AEMaaCS), or are running AEM 6.5 in Adobe Managed Services (AMS), in both cases all software releases as well as web-tier configuration updates go through Adobe’s Cloud Manager CI/CD solution.

When deploying, Cloud Manager does give you some limited feedback to let you know generally what build step it is on, but many times, especially in lower environments where you’re more likely to run into a build problem, you want MORE feedback, and faster. And the way to get that is by tailing the build logs on Cloud Manager.

What AEM’s Cloud Manager looks like while deploying to AEM as a Cloud Service

IMPORTANT: Logging Caveats & Limitations

There are currently a few caveats & limitations (subject to change of course) to tailing the build logs with Adobe I/O:

So, here are the steps to go through to tail logs on an AEM as a Cloud Service environment:

Step 1: Adobe IO Access for Cloud Manager

The first step you’ll want to check is to make sure your Adobe account is provisioned with access to create a service integration on Adobe IO with Cloud Manager. If you go to https://console.adobe.io with your Adobe ID and create a new project, select “Add an API”. You should see “Cloud Manager” under Experience Cloud in the list of integrations available to you.

What the Adobe IO console should look like if you have Cloud Manager access

If you don’t see Cloud Manager in there (like I didn’t, at first) send an email either to your Adobe Sales rep or to SPP Help (in the case of a Sandbox instance) who can get you sorted.

Step 2: Create an Adobe IO Project for your Cloud Manager (and logs) Access

You’ll then need to create a public/private keypair which generates a new service account (JWT) credential, which you’ll use later on to make your Adobe IO console authenticate to your Cloud Manager env as you. Make sure to save this public/private keypair on your local, as you will need it shortly.

Then, tell the integration what services it will get access to:

And then hit “SAVE CONFIGURED API”.

Step 3: Install the Adobe IO Runtime

This page gives the full installation instructions for installing the Adobe IO runtime. But in short, after installing NodeJS on your workstation, you:

$ npm install -g @adobe/aio-cli

Post install, you should see:

$ aio -v
@adobe/aio-cli/3.5.0 win32-x64 node-v12.18.0

Step 4: Install & Configure the Adobe IO Cloud Manager CLI Plugin

The full install instructions are here, but in short, run:

$ aio plugins:install @adobe/aio-cli-plugin-cloudmanager

Then, after that is installed, you’ll need to get the elements from the Adobe IO integration you created, and paste them into a config.json file which you can use to configure cloud manager. It will consist of:

//config.json 
{
  "client_id": "value from your CLI integration (String)",
  "client_secret": "value from your CLI integration (String)",
  "jwt_payload": { value from your CLI integration (JSON Object Literal) },
  "token_exchange_url": "https://ims-na1.adobelogin.com/ims/exchange/jwt"
}

Put that file on your workstation, then run the following to configure the credentials:

aio config:set jwt-auth PATH_TO_CONFIG_JSON_FILE --file --json

Then tell it about your private certificate which you saved from Adobe IO above:

aio config:set jwt-auth.jwt_private_key PATH_TO_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE --file

Step 5: Tell AIO what your Default Program Is

Next, tell the Adobe IO runtime what your “Default Program” is. In AEM as a Cloud Service, the “Program” is the collection of environments that make up a single web property. Navigating to my.cloudmanager.adobe.com, you’ll see a URL after logging in like “https://experience.adobe.com/#/@the_cool_name_of_my_company/cloud-manager/home.html/program/{PROGRAM_NUMBER}”

That number at the end is your program number, and you can tell AIO about it like this (assuming “1234” is your program ID):

$ aio config:set cloudmanager_programid 1234

Step 6: Start Your Build from AIO & Copy Build ID

View a list of available pipelines by using the aio cloudmanagerlist-pipelines command:

tad@tad-Precision-7750:~/OneDrive/ICF/aio/config$ aio cloudmanager:program:list-pipelines
 Pipeline Id Name                                     Status 
 ─────────── ──────────────────────────────────────── ────── 
 7239327     Web-Tier Only                            BUSY   
 4042555     Non-Production Pipeline                  IDLE   
 1023673     Non-Prod Code Only- DEV                  IDLE   
 299672      Non-Production Code Quality Pipeline[PT] IDLE   
 298825      Production Pipeline                      IDLE   
 298163      Non-Production Pipeline                  IDLE

Let’s say you’re going to want to tail the build log of your full-stack non-prod pipeline. In this case, the pipeline ID is “4042555” in the list above.

You can then start that pipeline by using the aio cloudmanagercreate-execution command:

tad@tad-Precision-7750:~/OneDrive/aio/config$ aio cloudmanager:pipeline:create-execution 4042555
starting execution... started execution ID 4042555

Then, you can see that the execution is started with the aio cloudmanagerlist-current-executions command:

tad@tad-Precision-7750:~/OneDrive/aio/config$ aio cloudmanager:program:list-current-executions
 Pipeline Id Execution Id Started At            Execution Status Trigger Current Step Action Current Step Status 
 ─────────── ──────────── ───────────────────── ──────────────── ─────── ─────────────────── ─────────────────── 
 4042555     198305      March 8, 2022 3:50 PM RUNNING          MANUAL  Build               RUNNING     

Step 7: Tail your build log with AIO

Then, once the execution has started, you can use the command aio cloudmanagertail-step-log with the build ID to tail your build logs:

tad@tad-Precision-7750:~/OneDrive/aio/config$ aio cloudmanager:execution:tail-step-log 4042555
2022-03-09T00:15:38+0000 The following build artifacts were reused from the prior execution 1132597 of pipeline 4043554 which used commit 38xxxfe09abc93e08073fa1735924f164:
2022-03-09T00:15:38+0000 * build/mycorp.all-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip (content-package)
2022-03-09T00:15:38+0000 * build/core-components-accelerator.all-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip (content-package)
2022-03-09T00:15:38+0000 * build/mycorp.it.tests-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar (functional-tests)

And there you go! Let me know if you run into any trouble, or if you DO end up figuring out a way to get those logs into Splunk!

About The Author

Tad Reeves
Principal Architect at Arbory Digital

AEM Architect & DevOps guy with 14 years experience on AEM/CQ and 25+ years in systems infrastructure.

Contact Tad on Linkedin

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