Start, stop, and restart Platform

Use the information on this page to start, stop and restart Itential Platform. Information on handling a force quit is also provided.

Always restart the Platform after properties have been updated. Profile services and properties can be accessed via Admin Essentials.

Service & Systemctl

There are two Linux-based management tools that provide a way to manage system services: service and systemctl. In the case of service, the command will redirect to systemctl on systemctl-enabled distributions. Both service and systemctl commands for starting, stopping and restarting services can be run on both CentOS and RHEL distributions. The systemctl commands can be run on Rocky Linux.

For new installs via Itential Deployer, the systemd service-name will use automation-platform.

$ systemctl <command> automation-platform

Where <command> will be “stop”, “start”, “restart” and “status”.

Legacy installs and installs using the bin installer will continue using the pronghorn service-name.

Start

Run the following to start the Platform.

service command

$ sudo service pronghorn start

systemctl command

$ sudo systemctl start pronghorn

Use this command to start the Platform as a service. With this command, the server will continue to run after you end the session. You can also use this command to manually start the Platform from the home directory.

$ sudo -u pronghorn node server.js

This alternate command starts up a temporary node. When you end the session with this alternate command, the server will stop.

Stop

Run the following to stop the Platform.

service command

$ sudo service pronghorn stop

systemctl command

$ sudo systemctl stop pronghorn

Restart

Run the following to restart the Platform.

service command

$ sudo service pronghorn restart

systemctl command

$ sudo systemctl restart pronghorn

This command starts the Platform as a service. Refer to the Start section above for more information.

Verify Stop/Start Status

To verify the Platform started/stopped successfully, use the system log file.

less command line utility

$ sudo less /var/log/pronghorn/pronghorn.log
$ sudo tail -f /var/log/pronghorn/pronghorn.log

systemd utility

$ sudo journalctl -xe
$ sudo journalctl -fu pronghorn

In a VM, these commands may be run from the root directory.

Force Quit

Itential highly recommends that customers never force quit the Platform, or use a kill -9 command on the Platform process.

How to Handle a Force Quit if the Platform is Never Restarted

In situations where customers do force quit the Platform and that Platform instance is never restarted, some additional measures are needed. A course of action to clean up Redis data is required and you must know the serverId of the Platform instance killed.

Find the serverId

Use this Redis command to find the serverId if you do not have it:

$ smembers iap:servers

Retrieve health keys

In the Redis CLI, run the following commands to retrieve the health keys:

$ srem iap:servers $IAP_ID
$ keys health:*:$IAP_ID

Delete the keys

Next, run each health key through the delete command:

$ del $KEY1

Alternately, to avoid running del multiple times, use a space-separated list. Each key is the result of the keys command run previously:

$ del $KEY1 $KEY2 $KEY3 $KEY4

Consequences if No Cleanup is Performed

If a cleanup is not performed, the ramifications are minimal; however, if the Platform is stopped via force quit and never restarted, the Redis memory becomes bloated over time and leads to an “out-of-memory” condition. To avoid this altogether, run the cleanup steps above or just simply restart the Platform so it can self-clean.