Sitecore 8: Troubleshooting production issues
By: Sitecore MVP Glen McInnis
Running a Sitecore 8 website and out of the blue, the site starts to show error messages or content goes missing? Here is a helpful list of troubleshooting steps for production environments.
End User
If you can access the authoring environment, the first thing to check is the general status of content.
1. Check that content is in a final workflow state
If content cannot be published, the content will not show, but if the solution is expecting certain items, an actual error may occur. To verify the workflow, open the Workbox and ensure all workflows are selected.
2. Check that items do not have publication restrictions set
3. Verify the content of the web database directly
If there are no obvious workflow or publication restrictions and you have appropriate access.
4. Execute a full site republish
If you still suspect that an item has not been published.
Technical Administrator
If the issue is not one of publication, more direct access to logs and the file system is often required. Here are some of the solution aspects to review as you troubleshoot.
1. Look for abnormal messages or actual ERROR messages in the log for a clue
Sitecore log files can be found in the /data folder.
The Windows Event Log may contain some additional detail or content that is worth reviewing.
2. Is the caching configuration properly configured?
Confirm any problematic components have their Vary By settings enabled.
Is the HTML cache clearer configured for each site in your instance? Each site needs to be listed for publish:end and publish:end:remote.
You can manually force cache clearing at /Sitecore/admin/cache.aspx to determine what effect cache might be having on the site(s).
3. Have you confirmed that the site entries in the patch files (or multisite manager) are producing the desired site list?
Remember that Sitecore will do site resolution on a first found basis.
4. Is the history engine enabled and does the history table contain recent entries?
5. Review performance behaviour of the application
You can monitor live or setup and review performance counters. Does the CPU usage spike unpredictably? Is RAM usage in line with expectations (Sitecore will easily consume 4GB of memory)?
6. Low disk space on the operating system or data drives can cause inconsistent behaviour
Check the web servers as well as the database servers.
7. Confirm SQL server database are in normal operations
Issues such as full transaction logs can occur.
8. Confirm that the connection strings to the database (both SQL and MongoDB) are correct
They can be found in App_Config/ConnectionStrings.config. Manually validate that these connection strings work and the databases are responding.
9. When were the search index(es) last updated
Are they consistently updating after publish on all delivery nodes?
