Introduction

• Consider the information available from the JS7 - Impact of a Controller outage
• For information about the behavior in case of outages see JS7 - FAQ - What happens to workflows in case of outage of a Controller?
• Use of a Controller cluster will leverage an outage situation as the Secondary Controller will pick up operations immediately during fail-over (3-5s). The failed Primary Controller instance can be started later on and will automatically synchronize with the Secondary Controller instance.

Troubleshooting

The Controller is the component in JS7 that holds job-related configurations and orchestrates Agents. The outage of a Controller instance does not prevent the execution of workflows with jobs running on the same Agent. However, it affects for example the execution of workflows that include jobs running on a number of Agents as switching of Agents during workflow execution is performed by the Controller.

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 Controller's log file controller.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 - HttpControllerApi(https://apmacwin:4344): 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 using 7-zip.
• Consider that a Controller instance can report problems related to other components such as Agents 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 controller.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 Controller instance's Java Virtual Machine, the outage of a Controller 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 Controller cannot be continued on the same server then relocation of the Controller instance can be a last means to fight an outage. Relocation includes to copy/move the Controller instance's JS7_CONTROLLER_DATA/state directory to a Controller instance on a new server. This directory holds the Controller instance's journal. To relocate a Controller instance copy the journal files to the new Controller instance. Refer to the JS7 - Relocating a Controller article for the steps to apply.