KB-1032 Issues with search server functionality

Nick Vigilante — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 17:27:13 GMT

Current Revision posted to Appian Knowledge Base by Nick Vigilante on 4/13/2017 5:27:13 PM

Symptoms

Users will see the following error in Appian:

Error Evaluating UI Expression

Expression evaluation error : [valid:false,syntaxError:false,value:Expression evaluation error: An error occurred while executing a save: org.elasticsearch.client.transport.NoNodeAvailableException: None of the configured nodes are available: []]

Along with the above error, users will see the following error in the application server log:

INFO  [stdout] (http-/0.0.0.0:8080-5) 2015-06-10 11:26:42,836 [http-/0.0.0.0:8080-5] WARN  com.appiancorp.security.auth.activity.UserActivityFilter - Could not record user activity: secCtx=rajivr, authDetails=AuthenticationDetails[ts=2015-06-10 11:19:47.704, entryPoint=PORTAL, clientIpAddress=172.18.0.220, clientUserAgent=Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0)] -- org.elasticsearch.client.transport.NoNodeAvailableException: None of the configured nodes are available: []

This results in interruptions in the following functionality:

Current User Activity (Appian 7.8 and above)
- If there is a limit on the number of concurrent sessions enforced per account, no users will be able to log in.
Precedents and Dependents views in Appian Designer (Appian 7.9 and above)
- A red error box will appear when attempting to view either precedents or dependents.
- Dependents on custom data types in /designer will still be available, but performance will be hindered.
Missing Precedents View (Appian 7.9 and above)
- A red error box will appear when attempting to open the Missing Precedents window.
Historical Interface Performance Trends (Appian 7.9 and above)

Cause

This is caused by an issue with the search server, specifically one or more of the following:

The search server is not running.
The search server is unreachable inside the network.
The search server is in a state of error (e.g., out of memory).

Action

To correct this behavior, perform the following:

Verify that the search server process is running.
- In Windows, there should be a Java window for the search server in the Start bar.
- In Unix, run ps -ef | grep search in a Terminal window. There should be a result for appian-elasticsearch-server.jar.
Edit each of the appian-topology.xml files (located in <APPIAN_HOME>/ear/suite.ear/conf and <APPIAN_HOME>/search-server/conf) and ensure that the search server is defined properly.
If either the search server is not running or it was not properly defined in both appian-topology.xml files, stop the application server, (re)start the search server, then start the application server.

If the issue still hasn't been resolved, verify the following:

Make sure the user running the search server process has read, write, and execute permissions over <APPIAN_HOME> and <JBOSS_HOME>. Ideally, this user will also be the user running the Appian engines.
- If permissions were not adequate, add appropriate permissions and follow steps 2 and 3 in the procedure above.
- If an incorrect user was being used to run the process, follow steps 2 and 3 in the procedure above using the correct user.
Make sure the port the search server is hosted on is open and outside machines can communicate to the search server machine using this port.
Make sure the search server process does not abruptly stop after starting the process.

Affected Versions

This article applies to Appian 7.8 and later.

Last Reviewed: April 2017

Tags: administration, search server

KB-1032 Issues with Search Server Functionality

Nick Vigilante — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 13:07:12 GMT

Revision 1 posted to Appian Knowledge Base by Nick Vigilante on 2/14/2017 1:07:12 PM