Planning for Troubleshooting

There are several steps you can take to make troubleshooting easier before encountering a problem. 60East recommends that you consider taking the following actions for a production instance of AMPS:

1. Configure the instance to log messages of info level or more verbose, if possible, or a minimum of warning level. Some problems require more information, so increasing the amount of logging typically makes troubleshooting easier if your instance has storage available. If space is extremely restricted, warning level will provide some information, although more logging may be required to completely troubleshoot a problem. 60East recommends that production instances log at info level or more verbose.

2. Ensure that client applications use unique names. Wherever possible, ensure that those names can easily be traced back to the instance of the application. For example, you might use the name of the application combined with the name of the logged on user as a unique name. This will help you to more quickly find log messages related to a problem.

3. Enable the administrative server. The administrative console is a good way to get a snapshot of the current state of a running instance, and the Galvanometer provides graphing and historical analysis capabilities.

4. If you are using replication, ensure that your AMPS instances have unique names. Where possible, use names that make it easy to relate replication messages to the servers that process the message. For example, you might relate the AMPS instance name to the purpose that the instance serves, the physical server that the instance runs on, or both.

5. Learn what normal operation looks like for your application. If possible, take the time to inspect the AMPS logs and the output of the administrator console when everything is working as expected. Applications vary in how they use AMPS, and what is normal for your application might indicate a problem in a different application.

   For example, if your application normally has a few publishers and many subscribers, seeing dozens of publishers come online may indicate that an application has unexpectedly started more publishers. Likewise, if no publishers are online, that may indicate an issue with connectivity to the AMPS server. Understanding normal behavior will help you to more easily and accurately spot problems.