Network Management
SolarWinds Platform Troubleshooting - Reports
Objectives In this document you will learn: Which logs to examine for reporting issues Which services are involved What steps to take to resolve issues with report timeouts, scheduled reports failing, and unexpected results
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Overview
Description
One of the more common SolarWinds customer support calls involve Reporting issues. There are many factors that come into play so it is important that you understand how to address this issue in a logical manner.
These issues will likely appear as one of the following:
- Report jobs failing to run.
- Reports Timing out.
- Reports not returning the expected results.
Scoping the Issue
What to Ask
Here are a few questions to answer before investigating further.
- If the issue is with a report Timing out or not completing.
- Has the report ever completed, is this a new report?
- Were there any changes made before the problem started?
- What is the time period for the data in the report? If it is very large can you try reducing it to see if that completes?
- Is the web site as a whole slow?
- If the issue is with the Report not giving the expected results
- Is this a report that you created or a default report?
- How do the results differ from what is expected?
- If the issue is with a scheduled report failing.
- If you go to the report that the job is running is the report slow to load or does it fail?
- How many reports are on the job? If you remove some of the reports does the job complete?
- Has this job ever worked?
- What are you trying to export the results to? Pdf, CVS, or HTML? If you switch the format, does it work?
- Reproduce the issue
- If you can't reproduce the issue, you can't confirm whether it's been fixed
- If its a once-off occurrence, the most you can do is check the log files, and try to determine what occurred at that time.
- Can it be easily reproduced or is it intermittent? Is there any pattern?
- What are the expected results?
- Understand the Environment
- What are the SolarWinds Platform server specs? SQL server specs? (do you meet requirements?)
- Check CPU and Memory usage on both servers
- Is there an Anti-Virus agent on the server? Has it been configured for on-access file scans?
- Narrow the focus
- Does the reporting issue occur on a particular report or all reports?
- Does it occur for all users, or just some?
- Does the problem occur only on certain browsers or all?
- Does it happen only at a current time of day? Does running the report or job at a different time succeed?
Product section
Cause
Services involved
| Service Name | Description | Software Packages | Role | |
| World Wide Web Publishing Service | Provides Web connectivity and administration through the Internet Information Services Manager | Microsoft IIS (all versions) | Web Server facilitates HTTP connection and API integration as well as authentication | |
| IIS Admin Service | Enables the server to administer Web and FTP services. If stopped, the server will be unable to run Web, FTP, NNTP or SMTP sites or configure IIS, if disabled any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start | Microsoft IIS 6 only | Used to configure IIS 6 websites and Application Pools | |
| HTTP SSL |
| Microsoft IIS 6 only | Facilitates SSL connections on IIS 6 | |
| SolarWinds Information Service | Communication Service for READ ONLY SQL data | SolarWinds Platform | Used for Subscriptions, Notifications, Dependencies, Containers (Groups), Orion Authentication, EOC Communication, NCM Communication and Limitations | |
| SolarWinds Orion Module Engine | Service used to launch module engine plug-ins for all SolarWinds Platform products | SolarWinds Platform | Used for Core Licensing and Module Specific operations. Each SolarWinds Platform Module will use this service differently. Common examples are Topology and Manage Nodes operations |
Resolution
Examine the Logs
The SolarWinds Platform produces numerous log files. These are the log files that would likely yield clues for this particular issue, in order of importance:
Information Service / SWIS - C:\ProgramData\SolarWinds\InformationService\v3.0\Orion.InformationService.log
Core Business Layer - C:\ProgramData\SolarWinds\Logs\Orion\Core.BusinessLayer.log
Action Execution
If any Actions failed check this log
Located in: SolarWinds Platform Server: C:\ProgramData\Solarwinds\Logs\Orion\ActionsExecution.log
- Reproduce the issue first before looking at this log file
- The newest entries are at the bottom
- This is the most useful log for scheduled report jobs, it will give errors like the ones below for issues with the Https connection or for the conversion to the selected format, PDF, HTML, etc..
- Handy search phrases - take note of the time stamps so you can correlate them with Orion.Information.Service.log
See SolarWinds Platform Troubleshooting Guide - Website Performance
Issues
- NTA Large report timeout. See NTA Reports timeout in web console if large date range set.
- Webconsole timeout Large reports. See Large report error: Unexpected Website Error "Request timed out.".
- Manually running Schedule fails. See Manually running Scheduled Reports: Failed.
- Unable to retrieve PDF type. See Unable to retrieve the URL for scheduled PDF report.
- Email not sent with Report. See Alerts and reports URL not working and e-mail sent is empty.
- Error when Generating report on Web. See Error displays when generating a report.