APM Agent logs throwing - An exception occurred checking directives files

Products

• CA Application Performance Management Agent (APM / Wily / Introscope)
• CA Application Performance Management (APM / Wily / Introscope)
• INTROSCOPE
• DX Application Performance Management

Issue/Introduction

During the Application Server restart, APM agent failed to initialize. the following errors are seen in the IntroscopeAgent.log file:

3/16/20 06:10:43 PM SGT [ERROR] [IntroscopeAgent.Agent] An exception occurred checking directives files
3/16/20 06:10:43 PM SGT [DEBUG] [IntroscopeAgent.Agent] 

java.lang.NullPointerException
 at com.wily.introscope.autoprobe.AutoProbeTransformer$DirectivesCheckHeartbeatBehavior.testAndSetDirectivesTimestamps(AutoProbeTransformer.java:1678)
 at com.wily.introscope.autoprobe.AutoProbeTransformer$DirectivesCheckHeartbeatBehavior.ITimestampedRunnable_execute(AutoProbeTransformer.java:1637)
 at com.wily.util.heartbeat.IntervalHeartbeat$BehaviorNode.execute(IntervalHeartbeat.java:972)
 at com.wily.util.heartbeat.IntervalHeartbeat.executeNextBehaviorAndCalculateSleepTime(IntervalHeartbeat.java:491)
 at com.wily.util.heartbeat.IntervalHeartbeat.access$2(IntervalHeartbeat.java:445)
 at com.wily.util.heartbeat.IntervalHeartbeat$HeartbeatRunnable.run(IntervalHeartbeat.java:668)
 at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:682)

Environment

APM Java Agent 10.x on Linux/Unix

 

Cause

The Agent was installed using a non-root user and the agent home directory had permissions 750

Resolution

Change the permissions of the agent home directory to 755. We need to have read/execute permissions for all users if the agent is installed with a non-root user.