Policy Server has stopped processing requests and smaccess.log is not getting updated

Products

• SITEMINDER

Issue/Introduction

Policy Server has stopped processing all the requests and smaccess.log is also not getting any updates.

How to investigate this type of condition?

Environment

Release : 12.8.x and 12.9 (Applicable to all the supported releases)
Environment: SMPLC (Siteminder Policy Server)

Resolution

Best is to run "smpolicysrv -stats" every 5 minutes which gives statistics information and this will help to understand what condition the policy server is in.

Usually when Policy Server is unable to process the incoming requests fast enough then the requests will pile up in the queue and in the worst case the Policy Server will report in the smps.log the max connection has exceeded.

In this condition the Policy Server will not be able to handle requests anymore.

By enabling the smtracedefault.log (please add Pid, Tid, PreciseTime, Function, Message and SrcFile on top of your current profiler setting), administrator will be able to check the worker threads and see if there are any delays at a specific function call or if the worker thread got into a hang condition.

In the above use case, Policy Server capacity will reduce over time and get into a halt condition.

smtracedefault.log should help to understand why Policy Server has stopped processing requests or where the delays are.

If an administrator is not sure how to analyze the collected the smps.log (with stats) and smtracedefault.log, please raise a support ticket.

Broadcom Support Engineer will produce a report and share the findings.