Troubleshoot Controller Issues

This page provides troubleshooting information for issues that may arise during Controller installation and operation. 

Controller Server Log

The primary log file for the Controller at the following location:  

<controller_home>/logs/server.log

The first step in troubleshooting Controller issues typically involves checking the log file. Search the log for errors that may correspond to the issue you are encountering. If found, an error log may help you identify and resolve the issue.

Also, see installation troubleshooting information in Custom Install. 

Identify Controller Performance Issues

The following are indications of Controller performance issues:

1. The Controller UI performs slowly. For short time ranges, such as 15 or 30 minutes, responses that take longer than 10 to 20 seconds can indicate that your Controller is under stress. 
2. When the Controller's metric reporting lags 7 to 10 minutes behind the current time, it can be an indication that your Controller is under stress. A lag of about 3 to 5 minutes is normal.
3. When monitoring the Controller environment, you see that CPU, memory, and disk metrics are at about 75% capacity.

If you observe degradation in Controller performance, it may be due to one of the following:

• The hardware resources for the Controller might not match the correct Controller profile.
• The Controller performance profile may be incorrectly configured.

To troubleshoot Controller performance issues:

1. Confirm that the hardware matches the Controller profile you use. For details, see Controller System Requirements.
2. Confirm that your disk performance matches the recommended thresholds for minimum disk performance. For details, see Controller System Requirements.
3. Confirm that the Java SDK version is exactly the same as the Java version on the Controller. To display the version of Java used by the Controller:
   • Open the command-line utility.
   • Go to <Controller_Installation_Directory>/jre/bin
   • Run java -version.

Monitor Heap Usage

• On Windows, use the Task Manager to measure the memory usage for the Controller.

• On Linux, use the top command to get statistics for the memory data.

  ps -elf (expect to see a "java" process and a "mysql" process)
  
  top (expect to see java and mysql with cpu greater then 0)

  BASH

Timeout Errors During Controller Installation

While installing the Controller, the Enterprise Console attempts to start up the Controller application server and database. At first database startup, the application attempts to create the database schema, tables, and other artifacts needed by the Controller.  

By default, the Enterprise Console waits 45 minutes for the Controller app server or database to start. When installing a medium or large profile Controller or into certain types of environments such as virtual machines, the time it takes to start up the system can exceed the default startup timeout period.

Controller Does Not Start Properly on Windows

Your Controller may not be starting due to file extensions of transaction logs created by Glassfish. Excluding the Controller data directory from being scanned by virus scanners as specified on Prepare Windows for the Controller does not account for these extent files found in the <AppDynamicsInstall>\Controller\appserver\glassfish\domains\domain1\logs\server\tx directory. When your antivirus detects these extensions, such as WRY, it may mistakenly stop the process of using these files so the Controller ultimately does not start.

These transaction logs are used to recover any failed Glassfish transactions, so deleting these logs on startup is not advised. Instead, configure your virus scanners to ignore the entire Controller directory. 

No Data in the Metrics Browser

This may indicate that the agents are not correctly configured. Begin troubleshooting by looking at the server.log file.

All log files for Controller are located in the <Controller_Installation_Directory>/logs folder.

Multibyte Characters Are Garbled

In a Windows environment, you may see component names that contain multibyte characters (i.e. Japanese characters) that are garbled in the Controller UI or in exported files. To fix this, add the following to the Controller JVM arguments:

-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 jvm property to the Controller jvm arguments

Controller Shutdown Does Not Increase Free Memory on Linux

You do not generally need to be concerned about the "free memory" value, as it will always trend towards zero. The Linux kernel tries to keep its cache as large as possible. As a result, the Linux kernel does not release the memory even after process termination. The memory is freed only if it is required by another process. 

Controller Process Unexpectedly Shut Down

On Linux, memory allocation failures may cause the Controller process to be shut down unexpectedly by the Linux Out-of-Memory (OOM) Killer. The Controller log, server.log, does not provide information about the shutdown. Instead, to diagnose this event, check the system log (usually /var/log/messages) for "out of memory" entries written by the OOM killer, for example, as follows: 

grep -i "Out of memory" /var/log/messages

If you encounter this log entry, make sure that you have allocated sufficient swap space on the Controller machine. AppDynamics recommends allocating a minimum of 10 GB of swap space.  

Controller Server Swapping Too Often

If you encounter unexpected swapping on the Controller machine, you can configure how aggressive the operating system swaps by configuring the swappiness parameter. The swappiness parameter controls how often the Linux kernel moves processes out of physical memory and onto the swap disk.   The default value for the parameter is usually 60.  When you decrease the value, you lower the tendency of the operating system to swap.  This results in less default file caching.

See the documentation for your Linux distribution for recommendations on the value for the swappiness parameter. For example, RedHat recommends setting swappiness to 10 for CentOS and RedHat kernels version 2.6.32-303 or later if you encounter OOM issues even though swap space is still available. 

Before you configure the swappiness parameter though, ensure that the machine has sufficient RAM and that the buffer pool size for MySQL is properly configured.

To configure swappiness:

1. Check the current value for swappiness.

   /sbin/sysctl -a | grep swappiness

   BASH

2. Set the swappiness parameter.

   For example, add the following line to set the swappiness parameter to 10.

   echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

   BASH

3. Set the swappiness parameter in the /etc/sysctl.conf file to the same value you used in step 2.

   For example, add the following line to the /etc/sysct1.conf file:

   vm.swappiness = 10

   BASH

Could Not Determine the IP address of This Host Error During Installation

During the installation process, the Enterprise Console attempts to ping the Controller by the hostname or IP address you enter. If the ping is unsuccessful during the user input validation, the following error message appears: "Could not determine the IP address of this host. Please ensure that the IP address of the Controller host resolves to its hostname or to localhost. You may need to add an entry in the hosts file on the Controller host and retry the operation." 

To make the hostname resolvable, add an entry for it to the hosts file on the machine on which you are installing the Controller. On Linux, the hosts file is typically at /etc/hosts. On Windows, look for the file at the following location, C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts, or the location appropriate for your version of Windows.

Add the entry in the form of the following example: 

127.0.0.1 localhost myhostname

Use the IP address and hostnames appropriate for your system.

For example, the following shows the entry added as the third line of the default RedHat hosts file:

127.0.0.1    localhost.localdomain localhost
::1          localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
198.51.100.2 myhost myhost.example.org

Controller Cannot Connect to the MySQL Database

The following exception message in server.log file indicates that the Controller cannot connect to its embedded database.

*Server log exception:* "Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused"

If you encounter this error, verify that the Controller database is running properly. On Linux, you can do so using one of the following commands:

If no processes are found, it indicates that the Controller database was incorrectly terminated. Start the Controller database again and verify the Controller server.log file for any error messages. 

Stack Overflow Exception When Installing the Controller Installation on Windows

This exception is usually caused when you set the -Xss option to a lower value. We recommend changing this value to 96000.

Triggering Automatic Collection of Controller Logs

Use the following console commands to trigger automatic capture of Controller log files:

• On Linux, run:

  bin/platform-admin.sh submit-job --platform-name test --service controller --job retrieve-log

• On Windows, open an elevated command prompt (in the Windows start menu, right-click the Command Prompt icon and choose Run as Administrator) and run:

  bin/platform-admin.exe cli submit-job --platform-name test --service controller --job retrieve-log

  The logs will be copied in the Enterprise Console host under platform-admin/logs-controller-<platform-name>-<date-time-stamp>.zip.

See Platform Log Files to learn how to manage your Controller logs.

Collecting Troubleshooting Information for the Controller

If opening a support case for Controller troubleshooting, you can facilitate the diagnosis of the problem by providing the following information:

• Submit all platform-admin/logs/* and platform-admin/logs-controller-*.zip, in particular the server.log files. You can also use the log file utility described in Triggering automatic collection of Controller logs to collect logs. 
• If the Controller runs out of memory, it generates a heap dump. Submit all files in <controller_home>/appserver/glassfish/domains/domain1/config/hprof.
• Submit all <controller_home>/appserver/glassfish/domains/domain1/config/gc.log files.
• Submit information about the hardware and operating system configuration of the machine that is currently hosting the Controller, including operating system, bit version, CPU cores, clock speed, disk configuration, and RAM.

• Indicate the Performance profile of Controller. Run the controller diagnosis command which captures the information in platform-admin-server.log:

  bin/platform-admin.sh submit-job --platform-name <platform_name> --job diagnosis --service controller 

  BASH

  bin/platform-admin.exe cli submit-job --platform-name <platform_name> --job diagnosis --service controller 

  BASH
  Refer to the Controller diagnostic data in the platform-admin-server.log. See a sample Controller diagnostic data on Manage a High Availability Deployment.

Issues Generating Audit Reports Immediately after Upgrading the Controller to 4.5

When the Controller upgrade is complete, audit reports may not work immediately. The audit database table is getting migrated only after the upgrade process and the migration takes at least an hour to complete. If audit reports are run before completing the migration process, audit table migration messages are logged in the server.log file.

No actions are required, try running the audit reports again after an hour.