I deployed my service package into Windows Azure. Management Portal has been showing "waiting for the role instance to start" for 30 minutes already so I assume something is wrong.
I know that there's Azure Diagnostics, but is there some easier way to find what's going on in my instance - like some console displaying some detailed output or something?
In these cases, it is probably the most expedient to simply RDP into the box and see what is going on. Event logs, hitting the site, etc., from inside the machine usually gives you a pretty good idea. If you have Intellitrace (Visual Studio Ultimate), you can also enable that and suck down the logs to see what is happening. That works very well also.
#dunnry The problem is that you can't open a RDP session to the server if your Azure Role is not running, so you don't know anything what is going on.
Most of the times there is something wrong in your Azure Configuration files. Try removing parts and redeploy afterwards. Pay triple attention to your ConnectionStrings. Make sure that the ServiceDefinition ConfigurationSettings are all defined in the ServiceConfiguration ConfigurationSettings File.
What we basically do is to deploy on a nightly build basis. We can check our ChangeSets of the day before after an instance is not reaching the running state.
If the Azure Diagnostics doesn't tell you anything then I don't think so - no. Somewhat annoyingly, one thing that frequently causes problems is Azure Diagnostics initialization - e.g. if the diagnostics connection string is wrong.
If the role instances start but the app has problems then the remote desktop might help.
If all else fails, try Azure support - it's still free right now.
Related
I keep getting this error:
Error 1061: The service cannot accept control messages at this time
This happens when I attempt to stop the service installed using InstallUtil from this location: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\InstallUtil.exe
I am attempting to debug the windows service in question. My problem is that everytime I attempt to introduce changes to the codebase, the computer "A physical machine - Dell Precision T3500" requires that I restart the entire machine to completely uninstall the service, before I do a reinstall.
I have looked at this Link and it is not helpful in my scenario as I would first have to stop the service to be able to gain full access to the location where my build is generated to.
Whilst the service is attempting to restart before I do the restart of PC, when I attempt to build the service from my code, I get this interesting error from the compiler:
Error 16 Unable to copy file
"obj\x86\Debug\X_WindowsService.exe" to
"bin\x86\Debug\X_WindowsService.exe". The process cannot
access the file 'bin\x86\Debug\X_WindowsService.exe' because
it is being used by another process. X_WindowsService
Because of the error above I also think this is why I am not able to use the SO solution from here.
Does anyone have a clever idea for me to go through to bypass having to restart the machine as I debug and make changes to my codebase?
I also had a look at this link from SO but it has no marked solution, I also tried one of the Microsoft forums for a solution but it too has no applicable solution as they recommend the restart which I am trying to avert.
I feel so silly after finding this solution. I should most certainly have used the KISS principle for this one.
Turns out, all I had to do was look for the service's process from task manager and simply end the task. After that a refresh to my services list shows the service status as blank, meaning it has completely stopped without a restart of the machine.
I've had an Azure VM running fine for years but all of a sudden I can't access it anymore. Not through RDP nor through http.
Nothing changed on my side and Microsoft only gives phone support for 230€/month. What to do?
Maybe it has corrupted? The only two things I can think of are: try connecting over Powershell to see if it will respond; You could pull it down from storage and launch the console locally to see what is going on? Azure as you may know doesn't offer a console access. The only other option is to rebuild it assuming you have backups etc.
Ok, finally put the money down and got it up again. The advice on the phone was to upgrade from A2 to A3 processor/memory specs. This would force the VM to go to another machine, ruling out problems with the hardware / NIC. This worked but was quite expensive. They will get back to me next week with the exact problem report.
I have two cloud solutions (.ccproj files). Each has a single distinct web role. One project runs under Compute Emulator without any problems but when I try to run another one (the first one not running) Visual Studio will package it and then display
Windows Azure Tools: There was no endpoint listening at net.pipe://localhost/dfagent/2/host that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more details.
Windows Azure Tools: The Windows Azure compute emulator is not running or responding. Stopping the debugging session.
I'm using SDK version 1.4
I Googled for a while but couldn't find anything that could help me. Force starting the Compute Emulator (csrun /devfabric:start) doesn't seem to help.
How do I resolve this problem?
Although an old question, I got this issue recently and the reason for it was that - while the service or website in azure would have been removed or stopped and you try to publish to it. If this happens, check the publish profile to see that you are pointing to the correct service/site including the storage acc etc and correct them. Hope it helps someone.
I am trying to start up a web role on Windows Azure, but it initializes, goes to busy/stop and continues the endless loop of busy then stop. I have followed the recommendations of this question : Windows Azure Deployment but still no joy. Of course the application runs nicely in the development fabric when I debug
I have done these things so far:
Turned off the diagnostics to ensure azure storage is not used
Made sure that copylocal=true is set for each no microsoft assembly.
Added the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.* references that the sample web role adds
Did a test run of the basic MVC role and that works.
Did a dependency analysis to make sure I am explicity referencing all assemblies using this tool Dependency Visualizer and that they are in the package for deployment. no joy.
Is there a startup log that azure keeps that I can access or similar facility so that I can learn what is failing?
Do you have access to Intellitrace? If you turn that on (VS Ultimate SKU), you can easily download the logs and see why the role is failing to start. Windows Azure Diagnostics is almost certainly not the issue anymore. Back before SDK 1.3, it used to run in the same process as your RoleEntryPoint, which meant you a.) could crash your role if it crashed and b.) if your role crashed, it killed the monitor which made it useless for collecting information. However, the Diagnostics Monitor is now deployed as background task that runs outside of your RoleEntryPoint and it can no longer crash your role. If you turn on Crash Dump collections and Tracing and you should be able to pick those up. In theory your Crash Dump should have the stack trace.
I'm really loosing it here. Not being able to attach a debugger to a process is kind of a big deal for me. As such, I'm having a very hard time doing something to pinpoint the source of problems with an Azure-hosted application.
What's worse is that the app works fine in the Development Fabric, even when using online Storage Tables, but can go quite haywire when uploaded and running online.
I know IntelliTrace is one way to do it, but unfortunately, I've got a x86 machine, and the application uses RIA Services. As such, publishing it from my machine results in an error caused by RIA services. I can't build the application by specifying x64 the very same bug strikes again. (So far the only way that I know of to deploy a RIA Services Azure application is to set it to Any CPU and build / publish it from an x64 machine).
So IntelliTrace is not available. Online Azure doesn't have something to resemble the nice console log window of the Development Fabric, and as such, I'm at a loss. Thus far I've been just trying to get things to work and not crash by commenting out sections of code, but given the time it takes to upload and start an instance, this is hardly optimal.
Any suggestions would be appreciated at this point.
The Azure SDK has a logging / diagnostics mechanism built in:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg433120.aspx.
One route would be to deploy a version with some Azure specific instrumentation built in.
You could try to RDP into an instance of the role and see if there's anything in any of the logs (event or files) that helps you identify where the failure is.
Baring that, I think Amasuriel has it right in that you REALLY need to architect instrumentation into your solutions. Its something that's on my "must" list when building a Windows Azure application.
If you have access to another workstation with an x64 version of Visual Studio, you can configure Azure diagnostics to collect and copy the crash dumps to Blob Storage:
// Must be called after diagnostic monitor starts.
CrashDumps.EnableCollection(false);
You can then download them (using a tool like Azure Storage Explorer) and debug them locally.
If you absolutely need to see what's going on on the console Rob Blackwell has embedded a neat little trick in his Azure Run Me solution.
It pushes the console output of azure instance(s) out over the service bus. You can therefore consume that data locally and in effect monitor the console of the instances running on Azure right on your desktop.
AzureRunMe is available here and it's open source so you can take a look at how they've fed the console output to the SB.
https://github.com/RobBlackwell/AzureRunMe