Documentation forAppOptics

Troubleshooting (legacy agent)

The following content pertains to troubleshooting for the legacy AppOptics Python Agent.

AppOptics agents are no long receiving updates. The new SolarWinds Observability libraries can send APM data in AppOptics and are regularly updated with new features and improvements. If you are still relying on the AppOptics agents and your components are supported by the new libraries, consider transitioning to the SolarWinds Observability libraries for your APM needs. For more information about the benefits of migrating to the SolarWinds Observability libraries. Alternatively, you can use SolarWinds Observability as your primary APM solution.

If you have already transitioned to the new SolarWinds Observability Python Library, see the SolarWinds Python Library documentation for troubleshooting information.

SolarWinds Observability libraries are not compatible with AppOptics agents. Do not use a mix of SolarWinds Observability libraries and AppOptics agents to instrument applications that are part of a distributed trace.

Check the logs

By default the logs are sent to stderr. Common errors in the logs include missing APPOPTICS_SERVICE_KEY and not having been installed with the native library bindings built (should happen automatically on most platforms).

Check if your application is instrumented

You can check if your application is correctly instrumented by looking for X-Trace headers, eg. using curl:

curl -i http://the-url-of-your-website
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
...
X-Trace: 2BB5CEC860E76D82425C8048BBF5469BE9BC580A628B4A5611C2CA3A5601

You will find the HTTP header X-Trace from the HTTP response if the instrumentation is installed and enabled.

As a second diagnostic, the last two characters of X-Trace header indicates whether the request is traced: it is traced if the last two characters are 01 while not traced if they are 00. It is not expected that all requests will be traced; in high-traffic environments, automatic sampling kicks in.

Enabling verbose logging

Enable the verbose logging by define the following environment variable to 6 (Do not enable it in production environment, as it will flood your system with verbose logs):

export APPOPTICS_DEBUG_LEVEL=6

See logging level for more information.

Check agent connection to the AppOptics server

Review the agent log messages to see if there are any connection issues logged.

If your server is behind a firewall, please see the FAQ: My application is behind a firewall. What IP address(es) do I need to whitelist?.

Is the service key valid?

The format of the API token recently changed. The new token format which is 71 characters long, may not work with previous versions of the agent (before v3.5.9). Try updating to the latest version of the agent which supports the new format.

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