Troubleshooting startup failures

When you have followed the installation instructions and attached Plumbr JVM Agent to the JVM as specified, you should see a new JVM appearing at https://app.plumbr.io/jvms. Additionally, the JVM standard output should contain an information banner similar to the following:

************************************************************
* Plumbr (15.12.14) is attached.                           *
*                                                          *
* Plumbr agent is connected to the Plumbr Server.          *
* Open up https://app.plumbr.io to follow its progress. *
************************************************************

If your experience does not match the success symptoms above, please follow the five steps below to find out the cause:

1. First stop is to check whether the JVM you attached Plumbr is actually started. One way of doing this is by listing all running Java processes by specifying jps -lvm in the command line. Output of the command is the list of the JVMs currently running in the machine. Make sure the JVM in question is among them. If not, the JVM failed to start and you should turn to JVM/application logs to find the cause.
2. If the JVM is up and running, the next step is to make sure the Plumbr Agent you specified in the startup scripts was picked up. Again, the way to do it is to check the output of the jps -lvm command. The output would look similar to the following, where it is visible that the process with ID 6349 has picked up the javaagent from /home/me/plumbr/plumbr.jar.

   my-precious:~ me$ jps -lvm
   6359 sun.tools.jps.Jps -lvm -Dapplication.home=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_60.jdk/Contents/Home -Xms8m
   6349 MonitorContention -javaagent:/home/me/plumbr/plumbr.jar
   my-precious:~ me$

3. When the output above does not contain the -javaagent section for the JVM in question,the parameter specified in the startup script was not picked up. To proceed in such case, you should debug the startup scripts to see where the added / modified parameters are lost.
4. If the -javaagent was present in the process list, the next stop is checking the application logs. Search for messages containing “Plumbr” to see whether there are any traces about Plumbr exposing the problem. In many cases, when you find Plumbr log records, these contain both the cause what went wrong and the way to correct this. The full list of the error messages printed by Plumbr Agent along with the solution guidelines is available here.
5. If there is nothing in the application logs, next source for information is in Plumbr Agent logs located in folder logs/ next to the Agent’s plumbr.jar in the filesystem. The folder contains plumbr.log and plumbr-debug.log files. Search these files to see whether there are any error messages in the logs. Again, in most cases the error messages would guide you to the problem along with a reference to the solution.

If following the steps above does not reveal the source of the problem, feel free to contact support@plumbr.io and we will figure the solution out together.