Getting the serial port output

Written by

Yandex Cloud

Updated at June 9, 2025

You can get the output from a VM serial port and use it, e.g., for troubleshooting.

To access the output data, you need the compute.operator or viewer role.

Management console

CLI

API

Select the folder the VM belongs to.
Select Compute Cloud.
Click the line with the VM in question.
Go to the Serial port tab.
To use the CTRL + F shortcut to search, enable Raw mode in the top-right corner.

By default, the CLI uses the folder specified when creating the profile. To change the default folder, use the yc config set folder-id <folder_ID> command. You can also set a different folder for any specific command using the --folder-name or --folder-id parameter.

See the description of the command for getting the serial port output:
```
yc compute instance get-serial-port-output --help
```

Select a VM, e.g., first-instance:

yc compute instance list

Result:

+----------------------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------+
|          ID          |       NAME      |    ZONE ID    | STATUS  |     DESCRIPTION      |
+----------------------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------+
| fhm0b28lgfp4******** | first-instance  | ru-central1-a | RUNNING | my first vm via CLI  |
| fhm9gk85nj7g******** | second-instance | ru-central1-a | RUNNING | my second vm via CLI |
+----------------------+-----------------+---------------+---------+----------------------+

Get its serial port output. Since the serial port output is usually lengthy, we recommend writing it to a file:
```
yc compute instance get-serial-port-output first-instance > output.txt
```

To get the serial port output, use the getSerialPortOutput REST API method for the Instance resource or the InstanceService/GetSerialPortOutput gRPC API call.

Getting the serial port output

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