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DRAFT KB-XXXX Current user activity is blank even after clearing the search indices

Symptom

The Current User Activity tab in the Admin Console is blank. The following WARN message appears in the application server log:

WARN com.appiancorp.security.auth.activity.UserActivityFilter - Could not record user activity: secCtx=BPMSVC7, authDetails=AuthenticationDetails[ts=YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.MMM, entryPoint=PORTAL, clientIpAddress=XX.XX.XXX.XX, clientUserAgent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.92 Safari/537.36] -- java.lang.NullPointerException

Cause

This issue can occur for the following reasons:

  1. The search server is in a bad state.
  2. The environment is using a version of Apache that is earlier than Apache 2.4, and the mod_jk connector version is earlier than 1.2.42.

Action

  1. Ensure that the search server is running without errors.
  2. If the search server is not running, start it according to the documentation.
  3. If the search server is running, and the serach-server.log file located at <APPIAN_HOME>/logs/search-server/ contains errors, follow the Action section of KB-1082 to clear the search server indices.
  4. If the above steps do not resolve the issue, or if the environment is using a version of Apache earlier than 2.4 and a mod_jk connector version earlier than 1.2.42, upgrade to the most recent version of Apache and the mod_jk connector.

Workaround

The following workaround has been identified in the case that it is not possible to upgrade the Apache and mod_jk versions:

  1. Add the following lines to the bottom of the Apache httpd.conf file:
    SetEnvIf Server_Addr "(.*)" AJP_LOCAL_ADDR=$1
    JkEnvVar AJP_LOCAL_ADDR
  2. Restart Apache.

Note: This workaround mimics the fix that is implicitly included in the mod_jk version 1.2.41. This workaround should not be a permanent solution, and the recommended course of action is to upgrade both Apache and the mod_jk to the most recent version and remove this workaround. Leaving this workaround as a long-term solution introduces potential risks if Apache were to change the behavior in that area of the connector in the future. This could expose the environment to problems on subsequent Tomcat versions that are distributed as part of Appian releases.

Affected Versions

This article applies to Appian 18.3 and later using Apache as a web server.

Last Reviewed: December 2018