A set of steps to go through when something goes wrong.

I tried to install and ...

You believe Harvest is installed fine, but it's not working.

• Post the contents of your harvest.yml

Try validating your harvest.yml with yamllint like so: yamllint -d relaxed harvest.yml If you do not have yamllint installed, look here.

There should be no errors - warnings like the following are fine:

harvest.yml
  64:1      warning  too many blank lines (3 > 0)  (empty-lines)

• How did you start Harvest?

• What do you see in /var/log/harvest/*

• What does ps aux | grep poller show?

• If you are using Prometheus, try hitting Harvest's Prometheus endpoint like so:

curl http://machine-this-is-running-harvest:prometheus-port-in-harvest-yaml/metrics

Use the --debug flag when starting a poller. In debug mode, the poller will only collect metrics, but not write to databases. Another useful flag is --foreground, in which case all log messages are written to the terminal. Note that you can only start one poller in foreground mode.

Finally, you can use --loglevel=1 or --verbose, if you want to see a lot of log messages. For even more, you can use --loglevel=0 or --trace.

Example:

harvest start my_poller --foreground --debug --loglevel=0

which is equal to:

harvest start my_poller -fdt

See How do I start Harvest in debug mode?

Since a poller will start a large number of collectors (each collector-object pair is treated as a collector), it is often hard to find the issue you are looking for in the abundance of log messages. It might be therefore useful to start one single collector-object pair when troubleshooting. You can use the --collectors and --objects flags for that. For example, start only the ZapiPerf collector with the SystemNode object:

harvest start my_poller --collectors ZapiPerf --objects SystemNode

(To find to correct object name, check conf/COLLECTOR/default.yaml file of the collector).