Monitoring and troubleshooting Information Services

Spotfire provides ways to get insight into the status of Information Services processes in your Spotfire Environment. The following are methods for monitoring Information Services, as well as some troubleshooting steps for common issues.

Monitoring and diagnostics

Information Services process status: You can view the details and current status for the Information Services process for each Spotfire Server in your environment.
On the server administration pages, go to Nodes & Services > Network, and under the server of interest, click the Information Services service.

Note: If you have configured Information Services to run in-process on the Spotfire Server, you cannot manage and monitor the process status on the Nodes & Services page.
Information link jobs: You can view any information link jobs that are running or have been run in your Spotfire environment. The monitoring page shows the status of each job, whether jobs were completed or failed. You can also manually cancel any job that has been running for too long.; On the server administration pages, go to the Monitoring & Diagnostics page and select Information Services.
Information Services logs: There are multiple log files that pertain to Information Services, that can help you troubleshoot various issues. In your Spotfire Server installation directory, Information Services log files are available under /logs/informationservices.

Troubleshooting

The following are common issues and troubleshooting steps.

Canceling long-running information link jobs

If you have issues with an information link job that is taking too long and not finishing as expected, you can manually cancel the job.

To see all currently running information link jobs, go to Monitoring & Diagnostics page and select Information Services.
In the table, right-click the information link job you want to cancel, and select Cancel information link job.

Startup issues

If you have issues starting the Information Services process, try the following troubleshooting steps.

Note: If Information Services is not running when you try to use an information link or open Information Designer in the installed client, you get the following error message:

IS process is not started, cannot forward the
				request

The Information Services process might not have access to enough memory. Try to increase the max memory with the following CLI command:
```
config-external-information-services-process --max-memory=<value>
```
The initialization timeout might be set too low, not allowing enough time to start Information Services. Try to increase the timeout with the following CLI command:
```
config-external-information-services-process --init-timeout=<value>
```
The port you have configured the Information Services process to use might not be available. Make sure the port is available. By default, the Information Services process uses port 9445.
For other errors, check the logs in the installation directory of the Spotfire Server. Check the following files:
- logs/informationservices/server.log
- logs/informationservices.stdouterr.log

Missing driver

If you see one of the following error messages: Could not open information link. or Could not get contents of <data source> from the server. while trying to save, test, edit or open an information link, this might be because the datasource template is configured, but the driver is missing.

If the driver files are missing, you will also see an error message in the logs/informationservices/server.log file:

api.common.InformationModelServiceCommon: Failed to initialize connection pool: Cannot instantiate JDBC driver with class name cs.jdbc.driver.CompositeDriver

Try to put the datasource drivers (.jar files) in the <install-dir>/tomcat/custom-ext-informationservices directory.

Note: If you are using Oracle as the Spotfire database and you want to access data with information services (regardless of whether you want to access Oracle data), you must add the same Oracle jar file in both directories <installation dir>/tomcat/custom-ext and <installation dir>/tomcat/custom-ext-informationservices.

After you added files to any of the two folders, you must restart Spotfire Server.