Capturing diagnostic information for hung system?

Greetings,

I'm running Ubuntu as a VMware VM and am currently running into a problem where the guest OS (Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS) goes unresponsive, and requires the VM to be reset to recover.

We are not getting any good log information from syslog, and because the issue isn't a kernel panic, we aren't getting any kernel or application dumps on the OS itself.

I was hoping there might be a guide I could use to increase the logging verbosity of the default rsyslog configuration to capture something interesting, or maybe any other tips someone could offer to help us diagnose the problem.

We've been in touch with VMware support and had a technician go through the logs, however they claim nothing "interesting" is being found that would point to the hypervisor as the root cause of the crashing.

Kernel/Release info is:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS
Release: 14.04
Codename: trusty
$ uname -r
3.19.0-59-generic

Any help is much appreciated!