API Gateway: Error thrown in Policy Manager: "Cannot start Service Debugger. There is a Service Debugger already running for the service/policy."

Products

• CA API Gateway

Issue/Introduction

Trying to open a Service Debugger session in Policy Manager and receive the following error: "Cannot start Service Debugger. There is a Service Debugger already running for the service/policy."

Environment

All versions of the CA API Gateway which contain the Service/Policy Debugger feature.

Cause

This is often caused by unexpected disconnections between Policy Manager and the Gateway. When logging back in to Policy Manager and trying to open a new Debugger window to the same service, the error can be thrown.

• • The unexpected disconnections are usually the result of an issue with the NIC on the workstation running Policy Manager or a brief network outage.

Resolution

• There is a cleanup task that runs in the CA API Gateway ("Gateway") which runs periodically to remove Debugger sessions that have been inactive for a certain amount of time. By default, the cleanup task runs every 24 hours plus 1 minute, terminating sessions that have been inactive for 24 hours.
• The values for how often the cleanup task runs is configurable in the system.properties (/opt/SecureSpan/Gateway/node/default/etc/conf/system.properties) file on the Gateway, with the values being in milliseconds. These two properties are listed below and are documented with extra details:
  
  • com.l7tech.server.stepdebug.inactiveSessionCleanIntervalMillis
  • com.l7tech.server.stepdebug.inactiveSessionTimeoutMillis

1. Run this command via SSH on the Gateway node to edit the system.properties file: vi /opt/SecureSpan/Gateway/node/default/etc/conf/system.properties
2. Add the two system properties noted above in bold text to new lines in the system.properties file and set the values for them however works best in the environment, per the documentation linked to above.
3. Save the changes to the system.properties file.
4. Restart the Gateway service with the following command: service ssg restart

Additional Information

The Gateway service restart is required as the system.properties file is only read on boot.

The Session Clean Interval needs to be longer by a minute from the Session Timeout in order that they do not overlap.