Troubleshooting Application Deployment Issues on Payara Cloud

Deploying a new application to Payara Cloud may occationally be accompanied by errors or issues that prevent the application from deploying and running smoothly. Below is a comprehensive guide to help you troubleshoot some of these common problems.

No Deployed Application Artifact

Symptoms

You’ve initiated the deployment process, but there is no sign of your application artifact in the Payara Cloud Dashboard.

Troubleshooting Steps

  1. Check Upload Status: Make sure the artifact has been successfully uploaded. Look for any error messages during the upload process.

  2. Inspect Logs: Check the deployment logs for any error messages that could indicate what went wrong.

  3. Verify Artifact Type: Ensure that you are uploading a supported artifact type (.war) created from a supported Jakarta EE API version (10, 8).

DNS Propagation for Application URL Not Fully Done

Symptoms

Your application has been deployed, but navigating to the provided URL results in a DNS error.

Troubleshooting Steps

  1. Wait: DNS propagation can take up to 48 hours (depending on your location). You may need to wait before the changes propagate across all DNS servers.

  2. Check DNS Configuration: Verify that your DNS settings are correctly configured in your domain provider’s dashboard. Please refer to How to Use Custom Domains to confirm you have entered the right settings for the domain.

  3. Use DNS Propagation Check Tools: Utilize online tools (eg. https://dnschecker.org) to check the status of DNS propagation globally.

  4. Check Router: If DNS has successfully propageted (confirmed through suggested tool above for instance), then your router DNS resolver cache may need flushing. You can use tools such as ipconfig or flushdns on Unix and Windos system respectively.

Custom Domain May Still Not Have Fully Propagated

Symptoms

You’ve configured a custom domain, but navigating to it doesn’t resolve to your Payara Cloud application.

Troubleshooting Steps

  1. Wait: Similar to DNS propagation, custom domains may also take time to fully propagate.

  2. Verify Domain Configuration: Double-check to ensure that your custom domain has been correctly set up in your Payara Cloud settings.

  3. Check CNAME Records: Make sure you’ve updated the CNAME record to point to your Payara Cloud application.

SSL Certificate Not Fully Provisioned

Symptoms

Browsers show that your Payara app site with custom domain is not secure.

Troubleshooting Steps

  1. Wait: SSL certificate provisioning is done automatically by Payara Cloud for every deployed application. This also done for custom domains that you attach to your application. There might be some minor delays between when you setup your custom domain and when the SSL provider used by Payara Cloud (LetsEncrypt) resolves/processes the SSL request. The availability of SSL for you app could also be impacted by DNS resolution and propagation delays.

  2. Check SSL Status: You can use online tools such as https://crt.sh to check if LetsEncrypt is done generating SSL certificate for your custom domain.

Insufficient Resources

Symptoms

Your application is not running/performing as you expect.

Troubleshooting Steps

  1. Check Application Configuration: Verify if your application has enough resources to run optimally. Some applications are resource intensive, for such, you should check the applicaiton runtime size to confirm you have chosen the right runtime size. Please note that the available runtime sizes is dependent upon your current subscription tier.

  2. Scale Resources: If needed, adjust the allocated resources for your application.

  3. Review Logs: Look for any messages about resource shortages in the logs.

Timeout Errors

Symptoms

The application takes too long to start, resulting in a timeout error.

Troubleshooting Steps

  1. Check Application: Check if your application has any startup task that could be slowing down its startup process. Check if any external services being called at application startup are all up and available.

Incompatible Runtime Environment

Symptoms

Your application fails to run and logs indicate incompatible Java/Jakarta EE versions or missing dependencies.

Troubleshooting Steps

  1. Check Runtime Version: Make sure that your application is compatible with the Java (supported versions are 11, 17) andj Jakarta EE (supported versions are 8 and 10) versions running in Payara Cloud, and that this requirement matches the configured Runtime Type of the application.

  2. Review Dependencies: Ensure all required dependencies are included in your deployment package and they are also compatible with selected Runtime Type. For example, an included library may be compiled for Java 17 whereas your application was compiled on Java 11.

Database Connection Issues

Symptoms

Your application cannot connect to the database, resulting in application errors.

Troubleshooting Steps

  1. Verify Connection Strings: Make sure your database connection strings are correctly configured on the Payara Cloud Dashboard.

  2. Check Network Rules: Ensure that Payara Cloud has access to your database, especially if it’s hosted outside of Azure.

  3. Review Logs: Inspect logs for database-related errors or warnings.

General Troubleshooting Tips

  1. Review Logs: Payara Cloud provides extensive logging. Always make it a point to check the logs for any abnormalities or error messages.

  2. Obtain heap dumps or thread dumps: In order to diagnose what your application is doing having either of these tools might help.

By following these troubleshooting steps, you should be able to resolve most common issues related to application deployment on Payara Cloud.