Maintenance, error logs and monitoring (for System Admins)

Updated 5 months ago by Vaida

The following information is only applicable to a Team or Enterprise instance of RSpace.

Maintenance

Most maintenance operations such as server upgrades, or new RSpace installations will be performed on the server. However, through the Maintenance tab you can give your users notice of forthcoming downtime, for example for a server restart or update.

Steps

Go to System->Maintenance
Click on the ‘Schedule downtime’ submenu
Set the times the server will be down for, and an optional message. If you need to urgently update, then you can prevent users logging in with immediate effect.
Once set, users will see this information at the top of any RSpace page.
10 minutes before the downtime is due to start, further logins will be prevented, and users will see an alert warning them to finish their work and log off.

You can cancel or edit this downtime period from the same page.

If you want to login to RSpace yourself during the downtime period, there is a special URL /login?maintenanceLogin which will enable you, as a sysadmin, to login. For example, if you schedule 1 hour downtime, but the upgrade is complete in 10 minutes, you might want to cancel the downtime so that users can continue with their work.

Starting & stopping the RSpace application

Applicable if we've installed RSpace for you, or you've used one of our scripts to install RSpace

To fully stop the RSpace application, including the database, run the following commands:

sudo systemctl stop tomcat9

sudo systemctl stop mariadb

To fully start the RSpace application, including the database, run the following commands:

sudo systemctl start tomcat9

sudo systemctl start mariadb

If you want to restart RSpace (Eg. you changed a value in the deployment.properties and would like to restart RSpace for it to take effect.)

sudo systemctl restart tomcat9

To check the error.log on startup (to monitor successful startup)

sudo tail -f /media/rspace/logs-audit/error.log

For older systems:

If you've installed tomcat manually, then inside your tomcat installation folder, there will be a "bin" folder. Inside that folder you will find startup and shutdown scripts which you can use to start/stop tomcat. For example, run:

./startup.sh or ./shutdown.sh

Error reporting

If a user reports an error, you might want to view the error log or send the server logs to RSpace support. This feature is a merely a convenience feature to view the server logs from within the RSpace application.

In order for this to work, the deployment property TODO should be set to the location of the server error file. This will be in one of two locations, depending on your RSpace version:

For 1.30 or earlier, the file will be TOMCAT/logs/catalina.out, where TOMCAT is the top-level folder of your Tomcat install
For 1.31 or later, the file will called ‘error.log’ and will be in the folder specified by the deployment property logging.dir. If this is not explicitly set, the file will be in TOMCAT folder by default.

Once the server has been started with these deployment properties correctly set, you will be able to view logs or send them to RSpace via the System->Maintenance page. These pages only show the most recent logs, so if the reported error cannot be reproduced, or is old, you might need to investigate the server logs on the server itself.

As of version 1.35 Information on versions of RSpace components are logged on startup for reference when reporting issues.

Monitoring

The Monitoring page, introduced in 1.30, replaces the old ‘Performance’ page with more comprehensive and reliable information concerning CPU usage, memory consumption, and throughput. From these graphs, you will be able to tell the load thesystem is under, when the peaks of activity are, to help with your resource planning. This page is available through the System->Monitoring menu.