Appendix B. Troubleshooting

EC2 does not provide any method out of the box to indicate an instance has started correctly and services are running properly. Use of an external system for monitoring and management is recommended so that you can be proactive. JBoss Operations Network (JON) can automatically discover, monitor and manage many services on an EC2 instance with the JON agent installed, including JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and its services, Tomcat, Httpd, PostgreSQL, etc. Since there's no difference between an EC-hosted or locally-hosted instance of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform or JBoss Enterprise Web Server, established JON monitoring of both types of deployments is identical.

B.1. Diagnostic Information

In case of a problem being detected by JON, Amazon CloudWatch or manual inspection common sources of diagnostic information are:
  • /var/log/jboss_user-data.out is the output of the jboss-ec2-(eap|ews) init script and user custom configuration script;
  • /var/cache/jboss-ec2-eap/ contains the actual user data and custom script used at instance start-up (for an EAP instance);
  • /var/cache/jboss-ec2-ews/contains the actual user data used at instance start-up (for an EWS instance);
  • /var/log also contains all the logs collected from machine start up, EAP, Tomcat, httpd and most other services.
Access to these files is only available via an SSH session. Refer to the Amazon EC Getting Started Guide for details on how to configure and establish an SSH session with an EC2 instance.