DOKK / manpages / debian 13 / openvpn3-client / openvpn3-admin-journal.8.en
OPENVPN3-ADMIN-JOURNAL(8) OpenVPN 3 Linux OPENVPN3-ADMIN-JOURNAL(8)

openvpn3-admin-journal - OpenVPN 3 Linux - systemd-journald log viewer

openvpn3-admin journal [OPTIONS]
openvpn3-admin journal -h | --help

This is a convenience helper command to easily retrieve log entries for the OpenVPN 3 Linux stack. This command depends on the net.openvpn.v3.log service being configured to use the systemd-journald(8) service for logging.

The log entries presented using this command will only extract log entries for the OpenVPN 3 Linux backend D-Bus services.

Print usage and help details to the terminal
By default the extracted log will be in traditional plain text format. This option will change the output to be a more verbose JSON format, which will include far more details for each log entry.
Without this being provided, it will retrieve all log entries available in the systemd-journal. The TIMESTAMP format is not strict, but the order of the values are important. The keywords today and yesterday are also valid.

These are all valid time-stamp values:

--since 2022
--since 2022-11
--since 2022-12-05
--since "2022-12-05 15:00"
--since "2022-12-05 15:00:40"
--since today
--since yesterday


The first line will extract all log entries available starting with January 1, 2022. The second example will take all entries starting from November 1. The third one takes all log lines after December 5, 2022.

Using today will be the same as using today's date and yesterday will use date before today. Both retrieves all entries from midnight that day.

All OpenVPN 3 services, configuration profiles and VPN sessions uses unique D-Bus object paths. This information is stored in the systemd-journald, and you can retrieve log entries for only a specific service, configuration or VPN session.

--path /net/openvpn/v3/configuration/....
--path /net/openvpn/v3/sessions/....


The currently available paths can be found using the openvpn3 configs-list(1) and openvpn3 sessions-list(1) commands. Older paths can also be used, as long as they are still available in the systemd-journald. These paths are also available when retrieving them with JSON formatting.

This is similar to the D-Bus path, each D-Bus service are given a unique bus name. This bus name counter is reset when the host is rebooted. Currently available bus names related to OpenVPN 3 Linux can be found by running openvpn3-admin log-service --list-subscriptions.
This is yet another approach to filter out specific D-Bus services, but this filter is less specific. This will retrieve all records for a service, regardless of time, D-Bus path or bus name.

Some commonly used D-Bus interfaces:

net.openvpn.v3.backends
net.openvpn.v3.configuration
net.openvpn.v3.log
net.openvpn.v3.netcfg
net.openvpn.v3.netcfg.core
net.openvpn.v3.sessions


Each OpenVPN 3 Linux backend service which wants to send log events will be assigned a LogTag value. This is a fairly unique value. The currently used LogTag values can be extracted by running openvpn3-admin log-service --list-subscriptions. Older values can also be extracted as long as they can be found in the systemd-journald.
This is specific to retrieve log events for a specific VPN session. The TOKEN value is the value given to the openvpn3-service-client process. This will only extract log entries for the VPN client process itself and no other support services (such as openvpn3-service-netcfg).

All of these filters can be combined to narrow down the amount of log data.

openvpn3-service-log(8)