Troubleshooting manual data collectors

[Simon_Spehar]

Hi,

Is there any way to troubleshoot manual data collector configuration? For example, I configure the method invocation or SQL data collector, but I can not select the custom fields on a search. What is usually the reason for this? If I have configured the data collector incorrectly, how can I tell?

Thanks

[Kenji_Kumada · Accepted solution]

Hi @Simon.Spehar,

Thank you for your post to the community!

Unfortunately, there is no such troubleshoot manual for data collection configuration.

To troubleshoot misconfiguration issues, you need to check whether your manual data collector is configured as described in the documentation below and check logs for the agent that sends the data to the controller. The agent could be the standalone analytics agent, Java agent, .Net agent or machine agent depending on your environment.

Documentation for Configure Manual Data Collectors:

https://docs.appdynamics.com/appd/21.x/21.6/en/analytics/configure-analytics/collect-transaction-ana...

Documentation specifically for SQL data collector:

https://docs.appdynamics.com/appd/21.x/21.2/en/analytics/configure-analytics/collect-transaction-ana...

The logs that would be useful are mentioned in the "General Troubleshooting Issues" section of this documentation:

https://docs.appdynamics.com/appd/22.x/22.2/en/analytics/troubleshoot-analytics-issues

For the example you mentioned that you can not select the custom field (I'm assuming you can see the default fields but only the custom fields are not visible.), the most common cause is that configuration is not set right. For method invocation collector, this could be due to the wrong class name, method name, operation on a method parameter, etc.

This is one example of misconfiguration in the operation on the method parameter. You would find a log entry like below in agent.<timestamp>.log :

[http-nio-8080-exec-10] 17 Aug 2022 14:44:06,853  WARN InstrumentationPointUtil - Invalid configuration, could not find method parameter at index[3], maximum length of parameters for method [doGet] is [2]
com.singularity.ee.agent.appagent.services.transactionmonitor.error.common.spi.NoStackTraceThrowable: Invalid configuration, could not find method parameter at index[3], maximum length of parameters for method [doGet] is [2]​

Another example is the wrong class name in the data collector configuration. In this case, you don't see any WARN or ERROR message in agent.<timestamp>.log but you would notice that `ByteCodeTransformer.<timestamp>.log` doesn't have the class name you expect to match with your data collector configuration. When it matches, you should see the class name you specified like this:

[http-nio-8080-exec-1] 17 Aug 2022 10:47:51,632  INFO - Matching class name HelloWorld
[http-nio-8080-exec-1] 17 Aug 2022 10:47:51,632  INFO -     Matching class bytecode. : Class match found.
[http-nio-8080-exec-1] 17 Aug 2022 10:47:51,633  INFO -         Applying method interceptor data.POJOGatherer at HelloWorld.doGet ((Ljavax/servlet/http/HttpServletRequest;Ljavax/servlet/http/HttpServletResponse;)V) id:66

As you can see, how you find misconfiguration in the logs depends on which configuration is not correct. And this also depends on which data collector and which analytics agent you are using. But the basic idea to troubleshoot is to check the logs.

Hope this answer helps!

Best regards,

Kenji