Use Java Flight Recorder to record and share diagnostic data with Support to help debug performance issues in Puppet Enterprise

To get information about Puppet Enterprise performance issues, enable Java Flight Recorder to get data from PE services using the steps in this article. You can share the data with our Support team.

Version and installation information

PE version: 2019.8 and 2021.5

Solution

Enable Java Flight Recorder

To enable Java Flight Recorder from the console for all PE services on the infrastructure nodes, follow these steps.

1. In the console, click Node groups, and in the PE Infrastructure group, select the PE Master group.

2. ​​On the Configuration data tab, to enable the recorder for PE services, set the flight_recorder_enabled parameter to true for all services or selected services.

3. Click Add data.

Review the log files and share them with Support

Review the log files listed below and search for errors. Share these logs with Support to help debug a performance issue. Monitor the log directories to ensure they don’t take up excessive disk space.

Log location

• For console services: /var/log/puppetlabs/console-services
• For orchestrator services: /var/log/puppetlabs/orchestration-services
• For the PuppetDB service: /var/log/puppetlabs/puppetdb
• For the Puppet Server service: /var/log/puppetlabs/puppetserver

Change the default settings for Java Flight Recorder

To configure Java Flight Recorder, change the default settings on these service-specific parameters when you have disk space concerns or want more data.

The default settings should work for your organization in most cases.

These settings are all available as top-level settings for the puppet_enterprise class that will be applied to all services, except for flight_recorder_repository and flight_recorder_filename, which can only be set for individual services.

To control these settings on a per-service basis, on the Configuration data tab, you can change these settings for the following classes.

Settings affecting performance and the amount of information collected

flight_recorder settings

The default setting for this parameter (default) minimizes the impact on performance. However, setting this parameter to profile provides additional information but can impact performance.

flight_recorder_stackdepth

The default setting is 128 function frames when the recorder notes an event.

Settings affecting time and the size of logs collected

flight_recorder_maxage

Configure the maximum amount of time to keep recorded data on each service.

Default: 7d (7 days)

• s (seconds)
• m (minutes)
• h (hours)
• d (days)

flight_recorder_maxsize

Configure the maximum size of recorded data files on each service.

Default: 200m (200MB)

• k (kilobytes)
• m (megabytes)
• g (gigabytes)

Settings affecting file name and location

flight_recorder_repository

Configure where Java Flight Recorder data chunks are saved on each service.

flight_recorder_filename

Configure where the Java Flight Recorder compiled summary file is saved for each service.