How to interpret the gateway states showing in Pulse

Products

• VMware Tanzu Gemfire

Issue/Introduction

After doing a restart of two clusters connected by WAN, Pulse shows gateways in orange which seems to indicate an issue but when checking the status using gfsh> list gateways everything seems to be healthy. If the gateway sender, showing as orange in Pulse, is manually restarted using gfsh, it will show as green in Pulse.

Resolution

When you start a gateway sender it will try to connect to the receiver on the other cluster that it is connected to. The gateway sender only makes one connection attempt and if the receiver is not up and running, which could be the case if you are starting two WAN connected clusters at the same time, then the gateway sender will stay in the same state until there are entries in its queue that need to be processed and send to the receiver. The logic is made this way in order to avoid gateways using resources trying to connect when it is actually not needed.

In Pulse, there are two views that inform of the gateway sender state. In the situation where a gateway sender is up and running but still has not connected to the receiver, the overall cluster view in Pulse will show the connection state, which will be orange. The locator view on the other hand will correctly show the gateway senders running state in green.