Appendix - CloudView Support Information

This appendix describes several concepts and best practices that are useful for Exalead CloudView Support activities. These are basics that you must know before contacting the NETVIBES Support or R&D team.

This page discusses:

See Also
Appendix - Deployment Roles and Related Processes
Appendix - CloudView Console Commands

CloudView Processes

To monitor your application more efficiently, it is important to understand how indexing and search work and which process intervenes at each step of the Exalead CloudView workflow.

For more information about the processes involved at each step of the Exalead CloudView workflow, see Processes in Detail.

To monitor processes and check performance issues, see Technical Monitoring.

Key Configuration Concepts (Edit, Apply, Rollback)

Exalead CloudView has a versioned configuration.

When you save a modification in the Administration Console, the new configuration does not immediately apply to the running instance. Instead, it appears in the configuration store.

When you apply the configuration, it shifts to all running components. Exalead CloudView checks the high-level configuration for errors, then computes a low-level configuration for each process, known as the GCT.

You can find the configuration store in <DATADIR>/config. It contains the latest version of all configurations, stored as XML files.

To roll back to a previous configuration, you must:

  1. From the top navigation bar of the Administration Console, click the down arrow next to Apply.
  2. Select Rollback to version for the required version.

For more information, see Managing Configurations.

MAMI Basics (API-UI, cvcommand)

The Management API (MAMI) is the public API that allows you to administer and configure Exalead CloudView.

You can get a raw access to this API at the following URL: http://<HOSTNAME>:<BASEPORT+11>.

Note: The Administration Console and the API Console are 2 console UIs, designed to configure the MAMI and the Push API (AKA PAPI for the connector configuration) underneath.

For more information, see The Management API (MAMIs) in the Exalead CloudView Programmer's Guide.

cvcommand Command-Line Tool

You can use the <DATADIR>\bin\cvcommand command-line tool to run several administration commands to any running Exalead CloudView product. For example, back up and restore operations.

For more information, see cvcommand and cvcmd and Backup/Restore Operations.

cvdebug Command-Line Tool

You can use the <DATADIR>\bin\cvdebug command-line tool to perform advanced analysis and indexing debug.

For more information, see cvdebug.

Remove Useless Files

You can remove useless files to reduce disk space. For more information, see Controlling Disk Space.

Generate a cvdiag

Exalead CloudView includes its own system reporting mechanism. When an error occurs, the NETVIBES Support team asks you to send them a CVDiag (abbreviation for Exalead CloudView Diagnostics).

To send a CVDiag:

  1. In the Administration Console, go to Help > Create system report.
  2. Click Download.

    A cvdiag<timestamp>.zip file is downloaded. For example, cvdiag_20190829-102718.653.zip.

  3. Unzip the file.
  4. Identify the exact Exalead CloudView version that is running with one of the following methods:
    • In the Administration Console, go to Help > About Cloudview.
    • In the unzipped CVDiag, open kit_files/productversion.txt.
  5. In the unzipped CVDiag, identify the applied Hotfix level, using the hotfixes/cumulative/manifest.xml file.
    Recommendation: Always verify the hotfix level and install the latest hotfix before contacting the NETVIBES R&D team.

For more information, see Sending System Reporting.

Open the cvdiag perfmonitoring on Your Machine

You can use the Exalead CloudViewMonitoring Console to monitor performance.

For example, this is how to see a file system full after an index compact operation.

  1. Stop Exalead CloudView on your Support instance: <DATADIR>\bin\cvinit.sh|bat stop.
  2. In your DATADIR, rename your perfmonitoring subfolder to avoid overwriting it with the customer's one. For example, perfmonitoring.
  3. In your cvdiag folder, copy the perfmonitoring subfolder, for example, cvdiag_20190829-102718.653\perfmonitoring.
  4. Paste the cvdiag perfmonitoring subfolder in your DATADIR.
  5. Restart Exalead CloudView.
  6. Open the Monitoring Console: http://<HOSTNAME>:<BASEPORT+1>/perf-ui.

For more information about perfmonitoring analysis, see Check system health and services performance.

Replay a Query from search.csv

Exalead CloudView contains several reporters allowing you to collect reporting information related to the behavior of your front-end applications.

By default, the search-reporting reporter is active and collects user query data in search.csv file.

  1. Unzip your cvdiag.
  2. Go to <CVdiag dir>/run/<instance name>-cvdefault/searchserver-ss0/search-reporting.
  3. Edit the search.csv file.

    The default configuration includes many fields revealing information such as the query made, the number of hits returned, total query time, etc.

For more information, see Analyzing User Queries with Reporters in the Exalead CloudView Configuration Guide.

Get Java/Native Stacks

For each Exalead CloudView process, you can get Java and Native stacks from the MAMI at: http://<HOSTNAME>:<BASEPORT+11>/services.

Verify Applied Hotfixes

About FDs and Hot Fixes

During a release lifecycle of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Dassault Systèmes provides Fix Deliveries (FD), also called Fix Packs (FP), to fix issues or deliver new and enhanced features. Each FD corresponds to a technical release of Exalead CloudView that packages components called hot fixes (HF).

Updating the 3DEXPERIENCE platform with FDs, involves deploying the same FD version of all components already installed on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. This is to guarantee that they are compliant with each other but this operation is heavy and may take a lot of time.

For Exalead CloudView, to correct issues more quickly, you can deploy the latest hotfix of the technical release only. These hotfixes are cumulative so you can install the latest without installing all intermediary versions.

Do You Use the Latest Hot Fix?

The first thing you must do is to verify whether your installation uses the latest cumulative hotfix. To do so:

  1. In the Administration Console, go to Help > About > Hotfixes and look at the hotfix applied on your installation.
  2. Generate a CVDiag (see Generate a cvdiag), unzip it, and identify the applied Hotfix level, using the hotfixes/cumulative/manifest.xml file.
  3. On Airbridge, go to CloudView > Downloads > All releases, select your release and verify the latest hotfix version using the README.TXT file.
  4. If a new hotfix is available, download it from Airbridge and install it as described in the following section.

Install Hot Fixes

Important: Install the Hot Fix media in the same directory as the GA version. An Hot Fix installation is always performed in "delta" mode. This means that the Hot Fix media does not contain all files: it contains only the files that are different from the previous Hot Fix or from the GA level of the same version.

For more information on how to install Hotfixes, see Install Hotfixes in the Exalead CloudView Installation Guide.

Search API Basics

The Search API is the entry point for performing searches on Exalead CloudView. It provides a public HTTP interface to access the commands defined in the Exalead CloudView Search API configuration.

By default, when you install an Exalead CloudView product, the commands are available at http://<HOSTNAME>:<BASEPORT+10>/<COMMAND_PATH>.

For example, a Search command called "search-api" is installed, and is available at http://<HOSTNAME>:<BASEPORT+10>/search-api.

For more information about the Search API concepts, see The Search API in the Exalead CloudView Programmer's Guide.

For a complete list of parameters that you can use in this API, see Appendix - Search API Parameters in the Exalead CloudView Configuration Guide.

What is an ELLQL Query

Exalead CloudView Low-Level Query Language (ELLQL) is mostly used for programmatic generation of queries, similar to SQL. ELLQL is typically used by custom programs to enrich user queries and to add additional features. Internally, all user-entered UQL queries are transformed into ELLQL.

Note: You can pass ELLQL queries via the Search API using the eq parameter instead of q for UQL queries.

For more information, see NETVIBES Low-Level Query Language (ELLQL) in the Exalead CloudView Configuration Guide.

Difference Between mashup-ui and search-api

You can use either the Mashup API or the Search API for search in your applications.

For more information, see Choosing between the Mashup API and the Search API in the Exalead CloudView Mashup Programmer's Guide.

What is a Security Source and Security Tokens

Document security is implemented by indexing a document’s Access Control List (ACL) and generating security tokens when the user authenticates.

In Exalead CloudView, you must configure a security source to authenticate users and authorize their document access.

For a simple introduction, see Securing Document Access in the Exalead CloudView Getting Started Guide.

For more details, see Managing User Access.

Where Can I Find Log Files in the cvdiag and the datadir

Logs are available for each process. They are written to <DATADIR>\run\<PROCESS NAME>\log.log and can be displayed from Administration Console > Logs.

You can find a global log file gathering all process logs in <DATADIR>\run\global.log.

To reduce disk space used by logs, you can:

  • Change log location
  • Rotate and purge logs

For more information, see Configuring Logs.

Note: To retrieve log files from a cvdiag, go to <CVdiag dir>/run/<instance name>-cvdefault/<process name>/log.log.

For example, cvdiag_20190829-102718.653\run\myexampleserver-cvdefault\indexingserver-bg0\log.log.

Configure Logs in Debug Mode

In the Administration Console, logs are configured to Info logging level by default.

To debug your Exalead CloudView configuration, configure the Default logging level property to Debug.