Getting server dumps

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You can generate a server dump on your IBM® Enterprise Application Service for Java® staging or production environment to capture memory and Java information about its server instance for tuning and diagnosis. You can start server dumps from the Instances and Diagnostics tabs of staging or production environment pages.

About this task

The EASeJ server uses a WebSphereLibertyDump operation to create a server dump.

After you start the server dump, the service creates memory and Java dumps from the WebSphere® Liberty server instance, and copies server and application configuration files to a compressed (ZIP) file. After the dump is created, you can download the ZIP file to analyze its contents.

You can read about server dumps in WebSphereLibertyDump custom resource in the WebSphere Liberty documentation and server dump command in the Open Liberty documentation.

Procedure

Go to an environment page.
- From the dashboard, click the View environment link on the Production or Staging card.
- From the menu, click > Environments and then Production or Staging.
Start a server dump. You can start a dump from the Instances tab or the Diagnostics tab.
- On the Instances tab, click Start diagnostics > Server dump trace > Start.
- On the Diagnostics tab, click Server dump > Start server dump > instance_name > Start.
After the dump operation completes, download the generated ZIP file. On the Diagnostics > Server dump tab, click the Download action icon for the server dump.

Examine the diagnostics information in the downloaded service server and application status, configuration, and log files.

For the sample application from the Open Liberty sample-getting-started repository, the downloaded server dump contains the following file tree structure.

apps      # application WAR file
└── expanded                 
    └── io.openliberty.sample.getting.started.war
autopdzip          # environment info 
└── ... 
configDropins      # setting, variable, and security XML files
└── defaults 
    └── ... 
└── overrides 
    └── ... 
dump_<date>_<identifier_number>
└── introspections 
    └── ...        # server and Java data in various TXT files
└── service 
    └── fixes    
    └── versions
└── usr 
    └── ... 
library-inventory.txt
logs_external      # log files
└── logs 
    └── ...

What to do next

Important: A server dump is deleted from an environment page one month after the dump is generated. If you want to preserve the dump, download it. For information about the EASeJ artifact retention policy, see Artifact retention.