Increased Startup Time for Ask Data Elasticsearch Causes Enable to Time Out
Published: 16 Feb 2019 Last Modified Date: 26 Aug 2020
Issue
Ask Data's Elastic search engine takes a long time to start up (that is change from red to yellow state). The following information is true based on your Tableau Server version:
For Tableau Server 2019.1.0 and version 2019.1.1, the elasticserver service(Elasticsearch) takes longer than 90 seconds to start up. This causes enable to fail, blocks Ask Data (the nlp service), and blocks Tableau Server from restarting successfully.
From Tableau Server 2019.1.2 and later 2019.1.x versions, the elasticserver service (Elasticsearch) takes longer than 300 seconds to start up. This causes enable to fail, blocks Ask Data (the nlp service), and blocks Tableau Server from restarting successfully.
For Tableau Server 2019.2 and later versions, the elasticserver service (Elasticsearch) takes longer than 300 seconds to start up. This blocks Ask Data (the nlp service): user queries cannot be processed.
Go to the server’s TSM Admin Web GUI, check if all NLP services are ACTIVE and HEALTHY.
If any of the nlp services does not have status ACTIVE and HEALTHY, go to the corresponding node and identify the service: ps aux | grep nlp . Kill the process using the process id found. Then tabsvc will automatically restart the terminated NLP service.
For Tableau Server on Windows
Stop Elasticserver
First stop tabadminagent: net stop tabadminagent_0
Then call C:\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server\data\tabsvc\services\elasticserver*\disable.cmd for the Elasticserver service.
Go to the host with the elasticserver service. On Tableau 2019.2 or higher, you may have multiple hosts; if so, do steps 3-5 on each
Navigate to C:\ProgramData\Tableau\Tableau Server\data\tabsvc\elasticserver\0\nodes\0
Rename the indices/ folder to a different name (within the same directory is fine).
Go to the server’s TSM Admin Web GUI, check if all NLP services are ACTIVE and HEALTHY.
If any of the nlp services does not have status ACTIVE and HEALTHY, go to the corresponding node and kill the service in the Process Manager. Then tabsvc will automatically restart the terminated NLP service.
Cause
In Tableau Server 2020.1, changes were made to the architecture of Elasticsearch which prevent this issue from occurring.
Additional Information
The issue occurs during server restarts. A server admin/operator might realize that not all the services have come up. Both the NLP and Elasticsearch (also called Elasticserver) services could be unhealthy in the TSM Admin View or with tsm status -v, and the restart command would not have succeeded.