Introduction

• Consider the information from the JS7 - Impact of an Agent outage article.
• For information about the behavior in case of outages see JS7 - FAQ - What happens to workflows in case of outage of an Agent?

Troubleshooting

The Agent is the component in JS7 that executes workflows, stores information about execution results and order state transitions in its journal and passes results to the Controller. The outage of an Agent prevents execution of workflows.

Troubleshooting starts from the fact that users reproduce and locate a problem in order to better know what problem occurred.

• As a first step check the Agent's log file agent.log, see JS7 - Log Files and Locations.
  • Warnings and errors can be found from the output qualifiers WARN and ERROR in a log file.
  • Example
    • 2021-10-10T09:53:04,939 WARN js7.base.session.SessionApi - HttpAgentApi(https://apmacwin:4345): HTTP 401 Unauthorized: POST https://apmacwin:4344/controller/api/session => InvalidLogin: Login: unknown user or invalid password
• Due to log rotation log files of previous days are kept in a compressed .tar.gz format on a daily basis, see JS7 - Log Rotation
  • For Unix use the zcat command to directly access compressed log files.
  • For Windows extract the compressed files, for example by using 7-zip.
• Consider that an Agent instance can report problems related to other components such as Controller instances and JOC Cockpit. In this situation check the component's log files.
• If you find a warning or error message that is not clear to you then try to do some research: the Product Knowledge Base and the Change Management System offer a search box, browsers offer access to search engines.
• When you completed analysis of a problem and you are certain that the problem is related to a product defect and not to resources of your IT environment then
  • customers of a commercial license can use the Support Resources including the SOS ticket system.
  • users of the open source license can use Community Resources.
• Should the agent.log file not provide sufficient information for a reproducible problem then consider to increase the debug level, see JS7 - Log Levels and Debug Options.

In some situations, for example if computer memory is not sufficient for the heap size of the Agent's Java Virtual Machine, the outage of an Agent instance can be handled by restarting the instance. However, problems indicating insufficient resources typically require permanent assignment of improved resources.

If the problem is related to server resources and if operation of the Agent cannot be continued on the same server then relocation of the Agent instance can be a last means to fight an outage. Relocation includes to copy/move the Agent instance's ./state directory to an Agent instance on a new server. This directory holds the Agent instance's journal. To relocate an Agent instance copy the journal files to the new Agent instance. Refer to the JS7 - Relocating an Agent article for the steps to apply.