Yesterday, our team encountered an unfortunate situation. Our OAC – Essbase Cloud environment started acting “funny.” We were unable to create new applications nor start existing applications. Here is what some of those error messages looked like:

This was the first time we’ve encountered this situation in our public GA environment, so a group of us all emailed each other for ideas on what to do. Remember that OAC is PaaS, not SaaS. In a PaaS environment, the customer controls the patches/upgrades/maintenance/administration. So how do you troubleshoot Essbase Cloud when something goes wrong? Well, that is a set of thoughts for a different day…

Luckily, newly minted Oracle ACE Wayne Van Sluys pointed us to some real-world answers. He’s been getting his hands dirty configuring and setting up OAC instances for our customers.  After we tested the issues thoroughly and confirmed that “something is wrong”, he suggested that we move straight to a service instance restart. We also logged an SR to find out more about why our environment hiccuped.

So, how does one restart the Essbase Cloud service?

First, anticipate that this process will take 10-15 minutes from start to finish. It took ~5-7 minutes for the service to fully restart, then another ~5-7 minutes for the Essbase Cloud website to come back up. These were the stats on our interRel environment, which has a single Essbase Cloud OCPU licensed for Enterprise Edition.

In addition, you will need to have administration rights in My Services to perform this type of action.

Finally, I’ll demonstrate how to do this manually through My Services. However, automated options are possible as well.

Part I: Navigation

Log into My Services (which you can access from cloud.oracle.com if you know a few key items about your environment – read this blog post here). This will probably land you on the Dashboard. Navigate down to the OAC instance and click on Action Menu >> Open Service Console:

 

Part IIa: Restart – Simple Option

Once you go into the OAC screen, you can directly restart the service from here by selecting Manage this service >> Restart next to the service instance name that applies to the one you wish to restart:

If you choose to go this route, expect to see that the request was accepted. The service  icon will change to show a yellow triangle to indicate that it is being restarted:

It’s important to know that this screen refreshes manually. Therefore, use the refresh button generously:

When the service is back up, the service icon will change back to normal:

 

Part IIb: Restart – Detailed Option

There is another route for restarting services. I prefer to go into the detailed service screen, as there is a bit more information provided about the current status and other important elements. So instead of using the Manage this service icon to restart, I’ll click on the service instance name directly:

This will take you to the detailed service instance screen. Here, you’ll find a series of buttons in the upper right hand corner. They correspond to Start Service, Stop Service, Restart Service, and Display monitoring information:

At this point, one can just press Restart Service. However, I am curious by default and want to try it another way, so I will first manually stop the service and then restart it. Press Stop Service and the following message asks if you really want to stop it:

Next, the screen changes to indicate that the service is in the process of stopping. Notice that the service icon has changed to display a yellow triangle:

So apparently this screen requires a manual refresh as well. I sat there for 10 minutes wondering why it was taking so long. The refresh button highlighted below is important – use it generously:

Once the service is stopped, the service icon shows a red triangle.

Next, start the service and press OK when you’re asked to confirm the action:

The screen will change to indicate that the service is in the process of starting, with an updated yellow triangle color on the service icon:

Keep pressing the refresh button. Once the service starts, the service icon will go back to normal and the status will change to Ready:

 

Part III: Essbase Cloud Website Recovery

Regardless of your path, the Essbase Cloud service should be fully restarted. However, if you navigate to the Essbase Cloud URL immediately afterwards, you’ll get this lovely little message:

Just wait ~5 minutes and it will all come back up. Right as rain!