PMT 2021 - Can the Untracked Servers list be cleared?

[TheRealMC]

Hi,

I've been testing out PMT 2021, and am now ready to move into production. The thing is, during testing, I added manually quite a few servers which had incorrect configuration information, and these are now just sitting in the Untracked Servers list (Settings... Server... ColdFusion Servers).

I'm looking for a way to clear the list of Untracked Servers in the PMT. I'm sure there must be a way to do this, but I've looked high and low, and cannot find anything. Does anyone have any advice?

(FYI, Auto-Discovery is off, and PMT/datastore are running on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS).

Many thanks in advance!

Mike.

[Charlie Arehart]

Mike, it's indeed true that that Settings>Server>ColdFusion servers page only lists them and doesn't allow removing them. I would agree that it should offer a means to delete them there, or somewhere.

As for a way to do it otherwise, I have looked and not found any.

First, someone may be tempted to propose that there's a "purge" page also in the Settings section, but look closely and see that is under the "Node" element--meaning it's for acting on the currently selected node, so that can't be about manipulating untracked servers. 🙂

Next, someone may propose that it could be listed in some config file in the PMT folder, but I just searched for the name of one of my untracked servers, and it did not come up in any plain text file. Instead, it showed up only in various binary files in the datastore folder.

So it might seem this information is one of many things locked up in the datastore (an elasticsearch index), and sadly Adobe has never documented at all how we might look at it (that I know of). There are various tools that propose to allow that, and I have had middling success with them (for various reasons). And even when I tried it with a setup that is working (to let me look in the index), I'm not seeing what would be the solution to this problem of removing untracked servers.

I'll say this: since you say you are switching from tracking test to prod, if you have no need to keep what you have from testing, you could take a brute force approach and try to uninstall and reinstall the datastore service. I'd expect that would remove the current index. That said, it would again seem there may be some other way to clear that out (or start using a new index). I just don't know it.

It seems we really need someone from Adobe to help with your challenge (unless someone else here can offer an idea). While an Adobe CF Team member may find this and reply, they also may not. I'd recommend you open a bug report at tracker.adobe.com, and point back to this thread for their sake and any others who may find that ticket. Then please do share the ticket here, so that we seeing this can add a vote and follow along.

[Charlie Arehart]

I see you opened a ticket, Mike, with a subset of what we've discussed here. I'll add a link there to this, as I shared more here that may benefit others who find that.

And again, for others who may see this and want to add a vote, the ticket is CF-4212671.

BTW, since then, I did more digging and found what seems to be the info in elasticsearch for finding such untracked servers. If your comments in the ticket mean you are now able to look into the collection, then I'll say to just see the misc_data index, and the documents/records with _type="instance-heartbeat", and in the document's _source struct, there's a key called  "traking_enabled" (that misspelling is Adobe's).  I found that where I had "untracked" servers, they were in there with a value for this key of: false.

But like you said in the ticket, it's probably best for us not to just delete records since there may be related records that should also be removed.  In one case there were no others (in misc_data), while in a second case there were, documents with type=node_system and type=node_memory. So again let's hope Adobe adds a capability to deal wit these, or shared more details.

Until then, might you consider just uninstall/reinstalling the PMT datasource service?

[TheRealMC]

Thanks for your responses, Charlie.

Indeed, the simplest way to clear the list would be to just uninstall/reinstall the service. I do hate that sledgehammer approach though. When I said I was ready to move from testing into production, what I actually should've said was that the test server has morphed into the production server, as various issues have been ironed out and more servers added over time. It would be a real PITA to set it all up again from scratch (server config, HTTPS, datastore authentication, etc.), now that it's working fine 😉

I had examined the data stored in ES (nice and straightforward using the API), and as you said, the untracked servers are found in the misc_data index. Assuming that's all the data, it would be pretty simple to delete those records using the API, so I'm hoping Adobe will be kind and add Delete buttons at some point.

Thanks again for your suggestions.

Cheers,

Mike.

[Charlie Arehart]

...or that they will confirm what operations we could do against the index in the meantime. 🙂

And sure, your elaboration on why uninstalling/installing the PMT DS would be a bummer in tour case totally makes sense. 🙂