Server: Better error messaging on server startup

[SeanAdams]

We spent almost a full day on Friday internally, and also about 3 or 4 hours of time for 3 Alteryx Server engineers (thank you all - MattH; ZachH; WayeW) and Ben Burkholder trying to get our gallery server to start.

Error message was "

Failed to construct Gallery daemon process, process exited code <9002>

This was all that was provided in the server log files; the gallery log files; and the Windows Event Viewer.

In the end, it turned out that the issue was very simple - the MongoDB had open locks in place that needed to be deleted; and then the service came up immediately.

Several man-days of our effort; as well as the precious time of the Alteryx Engineers who gave up their Friday afternoon to help could have all been avoided if the error-message on the server failure said "Login failure on server due to open locks - please clean out locks on db.locks collection" with a link to the solution or a lookup code that be researched on the Alteryx support site.     

Please could we go through the server service and eliminate all the exit codes and replace with human-friendly error messages - that way we could allow this kind of issue to be self-diagnosed, and allow the Alteryx Engineers to spend their time building the next generation of Alteryx Server rather than diagnosing a table lock.

cc: @avinashbonu @revathi @Deeksha @BenBu @WayneWooldridge @MattH @SteveA @ZachH 

[JulieM]

@SeanAdams I am really sorry to hear the amount of time everyone had to spend on this.  I agree that making these improvements would go a long way for everyone involved.  I am marking this post as "Under Review" so that the team here can start looking at what would be involved with this work to see if it's something we might be able to do.  We will keep this post updated.  Thank you!

[SeanAdams]

Thanks @JulieM  - I believe that the team are working with the Alteryx engineers right now, so we may have additional notes to add to this one

[Hollingsworth]

As a fellow victim of the MongoDB open file lock issue, I feel your pain. Enthusiastic star for this idea!

[KylieF]

Updating this idea's status back to Under Review, to be in line with past product updates.

[KylieF]

We are really interested in your idea, however we cannot fit this idea on the near future road map. We’ll keep this idea in mind however and update the status once we’re better able to speak on when and if we can implement it.

[bbarbre]

I just encountered a similar issue where Alteryx Service would not start due to an issue with SSL and all the LastStartupError.txt file has in it was "Gallery Service failed to start in a timely fashion, exiting"

This took days to identify the issue when having a message indicating the issue was with SSL cert would have saved a lot of time. 

Please make the error messages meaningful as the current messaging is not helping troubleshoot issues.

[TheOC]

Despite this being a thread from 2017, it is still very much relevant.

Often issues with Server require so much deeper investigation than the logs. Any love in this direction would be welcomed!