The Satellite XMLRPC API is a complete API, allowing management of the most common objects within the Satellite. It allows CRUD operations on channels, configuration channels, kickstart profiles, kickstart snippets, configuration files, etc. It’s organized using namespaces. Every trained developer will find his (or her) way in a moment.

The API calls work properly most of the time, but sooner or later you’ll run into an error condition and you’ll need to do some analysis. The Satellite software logs every API call including nearly every argument to a file. Nearly every argument, passwords are excluded. The API logging is stored in /var/log/rhn/rhn_web_api.log.

When additional data is needed, it’s probably to be found in /var/log/tomcat5/catalina.out, which is made available through the BUI too, but beware that this file contains errors that occured through BUI actions too.

The logfiles are maintained at the machine running the Satellite software. If you’re developing tooling which will use a Satellite running on a host you cannot login to, you should take a look at this post for a recipe on how to make your python XMLRPC-client log method invocation.