OnBase Troubleshooting
Greg Wheeler, Customer Care Team Manager
What went wrong?






Something is misconfigured
Bad data causes recurring errors
Your specific environment causes a strange problem with the
software
A performance bottleneck causes errors
Custom Code is failing
You may have discovered a bug in the software
Two sample scenarios

Documents stopped appearing in a Workflow queue
“Problem with the environment”

Unity Client error/ performance troubleshooting
“Problem with the software’s behavior”
(based on actual Customer Care Team solved cases)
Scenario #1: Where are my files?

Users report that a Workflow queue that normally contains
documents is empty

These Files are images that are released from another system

Just started this morning!
Uh, where are they?
?
Where do we start?

Most problems are way too big—we need to make them smaller
and more manageable/testable
Data Collection
 We
need to know what the user, application, script
or service was doing
 We need to try to differentiate between a coding,
data or environmental cause
 Can it be reproduced at will? What about in another
environment?
 What do the logs say?
Narrowing an issue down

Is it a problem with thick client, Core Services, or both?

What servers can we take out of the equation?

What modules can we eliminate?

What functionality can we exclude?
Diskgroup Storage (SAN)
OnBase Thick Client
(Workflow TImers)
Unity Client
Application Server
OnBase Thick Client
(DIP)
Database Server
SMB/CIFS
Diskgroup Storage (SAN)
OnBase Thick Client
(Workflow TImers)
HTTP
Unity Client
ODBC
Application Server
OnBase Thick Client
(DIP)
Database Server
First Step: Is Workflow…working?

Is it limited to this queue/lifecycle in Workflow, or are there others
affected?
?
Diskgroup Storage
OnBase Thick Client
(Workflow TImers)
Application Server
OnBase Thick Client
(DIP)
Database Server
Thoughts

We see timers are working – We see other documents moving
around

We can look at the timer machine to make sure THIS timer is still
running

Let’s trace further back
Is DIP…you know, DIPping?
Diskgroup Storage
OnBase Thick Client
(Workflow TImers)
?
Application Server
OnBase Thick Client
(DIP)
Database Server
What to check?

DIP is importing documents as a service on the DIP machine

To troubleshoot DIP, we would stop the service, then fire up a client
with the SCHED switch
If you see this…it’s not OnBase
If you see this…there’s a problem
Where did it fail?
Sys – Verification Reports
Let’s look at the directory
ProcMon Demo
Process Monitor

ProcMon can be used to see behind-the-scenes Windows calls and
access requests

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx
Solution
Issue #2: Unity Performance

Users are experiencing slow client performance first thing every
morning

Workflow queues taking a long time to navigate between
documents

Sometimes happens in custom queries, document retrieval

All users affected
SMB/CIFS
Diskgroup Storage
OnBase Thick Client
(Workflow TImers)
HTTP
Unity Client
ODBC
Application Server
OnBase Thick Client
(DIP)
Database Server
SMB/CIFS
Diskgroup Storage
HTTP
Unity Client
ODBC
Application Server
Database Server
Options

Observe Unity directly on Application Server (still slow?)

What about testing the thick client? (Verbose)

Look at Application Server performance (perfmon…or resmon)

Look at connectivity to DB/Diskgroups (ping/WireShark)

Look at Diagnostics Console
Let’s run Unity from the AppServer
SMB/CIFS
Diskgroup Storage
ODBC
Application Server
Database Server
Sometimes Thick Client is valid…
Test the Database

Choose a SELECT query and run it directly on the database server.

Compare times to complete

Is the query coming back quickly enough?
Perfmon
Consider ResMon
Diagnostics Console - Service Tab
Change to
“True”
What can ResMon tell you?
Test Connectivity

Application Server > Database

Application Server > Diskgroup
Diagnostics Console
“What went
wrong?”
“What is OnBase
doing right
now?”
“What queries
are running,
and how fast?”
Advice

Beware the Database tab in Production

Consider logging to a file to review on another machine

Log the least amount of information needed to troubleshoot
The rest of the story

Grabbed some queries from the Database tab from around the
same time

Ran them in SQL Server Management Studio

Slow there too!

Unoptimized indexes
The Smoking Gun
Your Issues!