Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

As a Support Engineer, I want the ability to obtain debug.zip directly, without needing to submit an SRE request ticket to request an SRE to do this task.

The process for obtaining debug.zip for a cloud customer currently involves many hops, including a manual task that only Cloud SRE can currently do:

The on-call SRE obtains debug.zip by running a cockroach command, which stores the output onto the pod that's running CRDB. For cloud customers, when a SRE runs this, it ends up on persistent disk, and then the SRE copies this onto their laptop, then sends that to the Support Engineer.

Describe the solution you'd like

The Cloud team would like to add the ability to download debug.zip directly from the AdminUI an HTTP endpoint (which support could then cURL). [7/21 update: s/Admin UI/HTTP endpoint/, based on comment below]

We heard that the ability to generate debug.zip via a SQL shell command was on the roadmap -- it sounds like @knz is the best person to ask about this? If so, we would love to use/extend this somehow.

@ajwerner suggested hooking the debug zip logic into an HTTP endpoint which the Cloud team could use.

Reference: Jun 30 Slack thread

Describe alternatives you've considered

Carlo/Ben proposed an alternative, but this requires a lot more net new pieces/unknowns:

Have a sql-level command like GENERATE ZIP TO ` (similar to the backup command), which could return the zip as a blob and leave storage to the caller.
This would require SRE to do additional work to make this call, then store the result into
some bucket (not yet existing), which would be shared for all clusters’ debug zips. Each cluster would only have write access to debug zip bucket. The bucket objects would have a short ttl (12 hours?). We can give access to this bucket to the support peeps. We’d create an intrusion endpoint to trigger the command, maybe even available from super user console.

Reference: Jun 18 Slack thread

Additional context

Bram also mentioned: It would also be cool would be a button to upload it to a write only S3 bucket so we can get it that way.