PLM Tech Tips

PLM Tech Tips: Tips for Troubleshooting Agile PLM: Knowledge is half the battle

sunzu7Troubleshooting an Agile PLM service issue for the first (or 100th) time can be very frustrating. But, there are some basic first steps you can take to better understand and identify the source of the service issue.

One of the keys to all troubleshooting efforts is gathering information. As Sun Tzu famously said “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Likewise, if you don’t know how best to gather information related to service related events, you will be fighting the same battles over and over again unnecessarily.

Acollect allows you to quickly gather together different information sources in one easy to access place. More information about using Acollect can be found on support.oracle.com in the article "Use Acollect to Collect and Analyze Data for Agile PLM” (Doc ID 1518524.1).

Often, a client will report an issue and end the request with "How do I fix this?” The report the client sends rarely has enough information to offer a solution. You can only offer guesses as to what might be behind the issue. Until you have more information. Oracle has made available a tool that I’ve touched on in previous articles—Acollect to help with information gathering.

I always start my troubleshooting analysis by reviewing logs. Logs are the basis for any good analysis. Agile provides a number of logs in the standard LOG4J format. Beginning with Release 9.3.2, Agile has consolidated the location of several logs to the ../agileDomain/servers/servername/ folder.

First up is the agilePCWeblogic.log file that contains information about what is happening in the WebLogic server.

Down one level in the logs folder are the rest of the Agile related log files including stderr, stdout and agile .log files. These are good places to start an investigation.

Look for obvious errors and search for them on support.oracle.com. A surprising number of errors have already been reported either specifically or with enough similarity to help your troubleshooting. If the current logs do not contain enough information to help direct your investigation, you can turn on additional debugging and trace information.

For details on this see support.oracle.com and search for the following documents, other documents exist as well so these are merely suggestions:

How to Enable and Disable SQL Trace on Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) 9.x (Doc ID 568239.1)

How to Enable Agile PLM File Manager DFM Server in Debug Mode (Doc ID 815269.1)

Best Practices for Maintaining an Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) System (Doc ID 1522897.1)

To learn more about Zero Wait-State and what we do, visit our products and solutions pages.

Subscribe to the ZWS Blog

Recent Posts