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Version: v1.28.x LTS

Gathering information to troubleshoot Zowe Application Framework

Gathering information to troubleshoot Zowe Application Framework

Gather the following information to troubleshoot Zowe™ Application Framework issues:

z/OS release level

To find the z/OS release level, issue the following command in SDSF:

/D IPLINFO

Check the output for the release level, for example:

RELEASE z/OS 02.02.00

Zowe version and release level

  cd <zowe-installation-directory>
cat manifest.json

Output:

Displays zowe version

  {
"name": "Zowe",
"version": "1.2.0",
"description": "Zowe is an open source project created to host technologies that benefit the Z platform from all members of the Z community (Integrated Software Vendors, System Integrators and z/OS consumers). Zowe, like Mac or Windows, comes with a set of APIs and OS capabilities that applications build on and also includes some applications out of the box. Zowe offers modern interfaces to interact with z/OS and allows you to work with z/OS in a way that is similar to what you experience on cloud platforms today. You can use these interfaces as delivered or through plug-ins and extensions that are created by clients or third-party vendors.",
"license": "EPL-2.0",
"homepage": "https://zowe.org",
"build": {
"branch": "master",
"number": 685,
"commitHash": "63efa85df629db474197ec8481db50021e8fdd65",
"timestamp": "1556733977010"
}
}

Log output from the Zowe Application Server

There are two major components of Zowe application server: ZLUX and ZSS. They log to different files.

The default location for logs for both zlux and zss is folder $INSTANCE_DIR/logs, but can customize the log locations by using environment variables in $INSTANCE_DIR/instance.env

cat $INSTANCE_DIR/instance.env | grep ZLUX_NODE_LOG_DIR 
cat $INSTANCE_DIR/instance.env | grep ZSS_LOG_DIR

Read more about controlling the log location here.

# navigate to zowe instance logs folder
cd <zowe-instance-folder>/logs

# or if customized, navigate to the environment variable path
cd $ZLUX_NODE_LOG_DIR

# list file by most recent first
ls -lt

Output:

List of files by most recent timestamp for both app-server as well ZSS.

appServer-<yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm>.log
zssServer-<yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm>.log

Error message codes

It is advisable to look into log files for capturing error codes. Warning messages contain the word "WARN", and errors contain "CRITICAL"

Javascript console output

When the web UI such as the Zowe Desktop or Apps inside it have an issue, the root problem may originate from either server-side or browser-side behavior. In addition to the server logs, the browser logs should be gathered. They can be accessed by opening a browser's web developer toolkit. Most browsers allow this via pressing F12.

Read more about it here.

Screen captures

If possible, add a screen capture of the issue.