Service started, not showing up in Architect or Web

[manoj928]

Hello,

We have a TM1 service and when we restarted this service, i can't see Data Server corresponding to it in either Web or in Architect. Day before today, it was running fine and all of sudden, i can't see it anywhere after restart.

Please suggest what went wrong.

Thanks,
Manoj

[Mike Cowie]

Manoj:

Bear in mind that with TM1 Servers running as services you'll typically see a delay between Windows saying it's "Started" and the server showing up in the TM1 client apps. How much of a delay depends on how much TM1 data, feeders, etc need to be processed on your specific TM1 Server. TM1 database load times can range anywhere from seconds to hours depending on the specific app and quantities of cubes, feeders, size of tm1s.log if recovering from a crash, etc.

A low-tech way of seeing if TM1's finished starting would be to look in Task Manager at the TM1SD.EXE process. If TM1's not yet showing up in Server Explorer after a restart and if that process is using up all of 1 CPU (or more if you've set it to use multiple threads on load via MaximumCubeLoadThreads) and RAM is generally ticking upward you'll know that it's still loading in the background - once it's done it will make itself visible to client apps (by registering with the Admin Server service).

It would be good to take note of how long a restart normally takes in your environment so that you can plan accordingly in the future and know what's normal for your application.

Regards,
Mike

[manoj928]

Thanks Mike.

The time gap was of 10-12 mins. But now when i am doing that, even after couples of hours it didnt turned up.

I checked Task Manager as well and the RAM utilization, and even after tickling up, memory usage got stopped at 4 GB, then as far i know after that it should show in all client app, but it didnt.

Thanks,
Manoj

[tomok]

Look in the logging directory for a file called "tm1server.log". It is a text file that contains status messages spun off from the service. If you have just restarted the service it is going to spew off a lot of messages to this file. When the service is completely started and ready for users you will see something like this:

3432 [] INFO 2011-11-17 18:37:45.501 TM1.Server TM1 Server is ready
3432 [] INFO 2011-11-17 18:37:45.501 TM1.Server Notifying the Admin server

Look for this towards the end of the file. If you see this then the server should be up. If you still can't see it in Architect then the problem is with your client.

[Mike Cowie]

Manoj:

Tomok's suggestion is a good one - I'm always afraid to open that log during an active startup for fear I'll interfere with TM1 writing to it, but as long as you aren't opening it in Excel or a program that will hold it open exclusively you should be OK and it should give you a far clearer picture of where the TM1 Server is in the startup process. After it's started you can also use this to get a sense of where much of the startup time is being spent.

Sorry to ask a really dumb question, but based on you saying that it doesn't "show up" I'm going to anyway: you did refresh Server Explorer (F5), right? The TM1 Perspectives/Architect/Web clients won't dynamically refresh available servers once opened...

Regards,
Mike

[tomok]

I'm always afraid to open that log during an active startup for fear I'll interfere with TM1 writing to it, but as long as you aren't opening it in Excel or a program that will hold it open exclusively you should be OK

A good point. I always "associate" the TM1 files that are stored as text with Notepad so that I can open them freely without worrying about reservations and the like. Notepad as very benign.

[lotsaram]

I'm always afraid to open that log during an active startup for fear I'll interfere with TM1 writing to it, but as long as you aren't opening it in Excel or a program that will hold it open exclusively you should be OK and it should give you a far clearer picture of where the TM1 Server is in the startup process. After it's started you can also use this to get a sense of where much of the startup time is being spent.

I was really surprised to read that. I have always opened the message log during server startup (in notepad) to check on progress of the server load. Never noticed any ill effect.

[Christopher Kernahan]

A low-tech way of seeing if TM1's finished starting would be to look in Task Manager at the TM1SD.EXE process. If TM1's not yet showing up in Server Explorer after a restart and if that process is using up all of 1 CPU (or more if you've set it to use multiple threads on load via MaximumCubeLoadThreads) and RAM is generally ticking upward you'll know that it's still loading in the background - once it's done it will make itself visible to client apps (by registering with the Admin Server service).

If you know the rough size of the instance you can also use the Task Manager to watch the instance load up and to tell when the instance is nearly loaded/finished, apart from seeing it in the server explorer.

If you have multiple processes running you'll need to get the process ID in cmd.

Use;

tasklist /svc | find "tm1"

[Mike Cowie]

I'm always afraid to open that log during an active startup for fear I'll interfere with TM1 writing to it, but as long as you aren't opening it in Excel or a program that will hold it open exclusively you should be OK and it should give you a far clearer picture of where the TM1 Server is in the startup process. After it's started you can also use this to get a sense of where much of the startup time is being spent.

I was really surprised to read that. I have always opened the message log during server startup (in notepad) to check on progress of the server load. Never noticed any ill effect.

I actually do often use a text editor (Notepad, UltraEdit, etc) to open up Tm1Server.log during startup/on a live server, so I'm sure it's an unfounded, irrational fear. I'm also afraid of circus clowns.

I did run a quick test, though, and it seems as though the TM1 Server is not bothered at all by a program holding a lock on the message log file... that is unless you try to shut down the TM1 server and the lock is still in place, during which time TM1 will hang on shutdown. The minute the lock is released it will flush out any unwritten log items it has buffered (and shut down in this case).

Chock it up to having spent time dealing with log files in ye olden times, back when TM1SMSG.TXT (TM1Server.log's predecessor) was locked to viewing and another moment in time when I believe you could view an active TM1S.LOG and cause all sorts of trouble. Working with TM1 over many years can make one suspicious of even the simple things. And circus clowns (in my case).

Regards,
Mike

[Harvey]

All good replies so far.

Don't forget that the admin host is a separate service which needs to be running also. If something has gone wrong with your admin host service, your client won't be able to connect to any servers that rely on it.

One obscure thing to check is that the network connection was not lost at any point during start up or while the server is running. This is a curious "behaviour" in TM1 which I think persists in the latest versions, where the admin host has a "heartbeat" function.

This means any server that is registered with it gets "pinged" regularly, and if the admin host can't find the tm1 server, it will remove it from the list of registered servers. If your network connection has changed or is unavailable during this "ping" the admin host can sometimes delete the server registration even though the server is running.

This is definitely worth checking, especially if your server has a WiFi connection of some kind which can reset quietly and stop your admin host from recognizing your server.

[Anuradha]

Thanks for all the replies. We just faced the same issue but eventually got resolved. Depending on the volume of data, it takes time for the application to show up in Architect even though the actual services shows as started. Patience pays