Heartbeat Monitor Server 11

[Steven H. Blackwell]

New in FileMaker® Server 11 and FileMaker® Server 11 Advanced is that the FMS Helper Service/Daemon monitors the heartbeat of the Admin Server and thus of the Console. If it goes deaf, the Helper Daemon/ Service will attempt a restart. Hopefully this will help address some of the issues reported with unresponsive Consoles.

Steven

[Jeff Hough]

Hey Steven,

Do you know if the FMS 11 'heartbeat' feature may be monitored by Simon (http://www.dejal.com/simon/)?

I have Simon monitoring my FMSs and paging me with interruptions in service.

Jeff

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Jeff:

Hi and welcome. I don't know, but I suspect not. it's an internal function. But let's see what we can find out about this.

Steven

[Wim Decorte]

Since you can do a manual heartbeat check by issuing a specific URL against FMS, I would say it's possible.

A better approach however would be to just monitor the FMS event log because FMS will log any heartbeat issues there with more information than you could get from just the heartbeat check itself.

[hexxabubba]

I did this to a tee...

Go to Layout [“Test” (City)]

Show All Records

Sort Records [specified Sort order:  City::Country; ascending 

City::City; ascending}

[Restore; No Dialog]

Set Variable [$varpath; Value: “filewin:” & Get(DocumentsPath) & “testfile.txt”]

Export Records [File Name: “$varpath”; Character Set “Windows (ANSI); Field Order: City::Country

City::City]

[No dialog]

 

It seems to run as when schedule is over it says ok in administrator. But I can't find file??? Also , when I try to import from 1 filemaker file to another it fails...Both are on the same FM Server, have exact same admins, there are no script steps that are not allowed for server. I have tried every way possible..Including having source file with fmnet:/myserver/SourceFileName.fp7 and hard return with file:SourceFileName.fp7. Which is suppose to work?? I can run server side scripts, but the import step will not run...What do I need to do exactly to run a server side script between 2 filemaker files??? I surrender... HELP ME!!!

[Steven H. Blackwell]

I do not believe you can import from a FileMaker Pro file as the data source server side. See Tech Info 7035.

Steven

[hexxabubba]

You are correct! Jacked by FM again. How come when I export txt or csv it says it happened in the scheduler, but the file is not in documents on the server??

[Steven H. Blackwell]

How come when I export txt or csv it says it happened in the scheduler, but the file is not in documents on the server??

Must be in a certain location. See this posting here on Forums.

Steven

[Wim Decorte]

check the event log to see if the running script logged any errors there. It could be that you have the export path incorrect.

[hexxabubba]

1. the Documents Folder in the root level of FileMaker Server.

It is important to read posts. I was looking in the documents folder on the server. However, I did a search by filename and did not find? Anyway, I went inside the documents folder in FMS, and there she was! Pretty as a picture! If my goal is to do a server side import from 1 FM file to another, then shouldn't I just schedule an export from source through destination file, and then the import of the same file after that, keeping the entire operation in 1 script so they don't overlap? Thanks again...

[Wodin]

Since you can do a manual heartbeat check by issuing a specific URL against FMS, I would say it's possible.

Could you elaborate on this? What URL would one use to do the manual heartbeat check? Or do you just mean something like http://server:16000/?

[Wodin]

This is great! A while ago the pe_application_log.txt got to over 5GB in one day because of some error which I have not been able to get to the bottom of yet. This caused the admin console service to start using up more and more RAM as it decided to read the log file (despite nobody actually running the admin console client.) I did notice that fmserver_helperd restarted the process if it died or was killed.

I have noticed some problems with fmserver_helperd from FMSA 11 that did not seem to occur with FMSA 9's version of fmserver_helperd, though (on OS X Leopard Server). It seems to accumulate zombies over time. In particular, shell processes and FM Web Publishing app processes.

e.g. at the moment I see the following:

$ ps axo pid,ppid,stat,comm | awk '$1 == "PID" || $6 ~ /fmserver_helperd/ || $3 == "Z"'

 PID  PPID STAT COMM

32775     1 Ss   /Library/FileMaker Server/Database Server/bin/fmserver_helperd

27989 32775 Z    (sh)

32820 32775 Z    (FM Web Publishin)

33239 32775 Z    (FM Web Publishin)

i.e. the fmserver_helperd process (32775) has three dead children that it has not reaped. It also has a living FM Web Publishing process not listed above.

One time I started FileMaker Server, the fmxdbc_listener also became a zombie and I had to reboot before ODBC worked again.

It seems the fmserver_helperd process is neglecting to call the wait() system call to clean up after dead child processes :