Getting a bundle when Jenkins will not start

When the CloudBees Support Plugin is installed, it automatically stores a bundle every hour in $JENKINS_HOME/cloudbees-support. These bundles are purged using an exponential retention strategy so that they do not overflow disk space.

If your Jenkins instance is not starting correctly, this is usually due to some class-loading conflict among the set of plugins that you have installed in your instance. Normally such class-loading conflicts will just result in one of your plugins failing to load, however in some extreme cases a plugin failing to load can cause a second plugin to render the UI of your Jenkins instance inaccessible.

In such cases, the latest support bundle (and some representative historical versions) can be very helpful for CloudBees in ensuring a rapid response and restoration of your Jenkins to an accessible state.

The support bundles are the files $JENKINS_HOME/cloudbees-support/cloudbees-support_YYYY-MM-DD_hh.mm.ss.zip where YYYY-MM-DD and hh.mm.ss are the UTC date and time respectively when the bundle was generated.

You can inspect the contents of these file(s) to assure yourself that they do not contain information you do not want to share with CloudBees. You can even unpack and repack bundle(s) if there is some specific piece of information that you need to remove from some bundle(s).

When you are happy with the bundle(s), just attach the bundle(s) to your CloudBees support ticket.