topic Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors in ArcGIS Enterprise Questions

Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

tmichael_wpjwa — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 16:30:45 GMT

I have a distributed collaboration set up between ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online. The collaboration is currently synchronizing 16 feature layers as copies.

I am seeing frequent failures with the collaboration syncing one or more layers. The Collaboration Sync Status area of /portal/sharing/rest currently looks like this:

Digging in to one of the "completed_with_failures" records, I see messages like this:

[{
  "taskStatusId": "9f50f1eba2404a04a61df6f351163539",
  "results": {
    "succeededCount": 15,
    "failedCount": 1,
    "notProcessedCount": 0
  },
  "failed": [{
    "itemId": "823cac5574374d7d840e77eb67580ba8",
    "itemTitle": "Base_Parcel_Collaboration",
    "message": "Failed to export item '823cac5574374d7d840e77eb67580ba8' into a replication package : 'Exporting item failed'"
  }],
  "notProcessed": [],
  "created": 1709654574646
}]

Looking at the "completed_with_failures" errors, it appears that it is not always the same layer that causes the issue. In many cases it's a parcel layer that isn't changing anyway.

I increased the log levels for both Portal and Server to DEBUG and found entries similar to this in the portal logs:

Failed to synchronize replica. Failed to synchronize a replica on hosted feature layer 'https://gis.<redacted>.com/server/rest/services/Distributed_Collaboration/Base_Parcel_Collaboration/FeatureServer'. {"resultUrl":"","replicaName":"","submissionTime":1709653058000,"lastUpdatedTime":1709653067000,"status":"Failed","error":{"code":408,"description":"SyncTools service error.(null)"}}. Failed to synchronize a replica on hosted feature layer 'https://gis.<redacted>.com/server/rest/services/Distributed_Collaboration/Base_Parcel_Collaboration/FeatureServer'. {"resultUrl":"","replicaName":"","submissionTime":1709653058000,"lastUpdatedTime":1709653067000,"status":"Failed","error":{"code":408,"description":"SyncTools service error.(null)"}}

So it looks like the sync service is having an issue with...something(?), but I'm not sure where else to look. Hoping someone here has an idea on where to look / what to try to track down these intermittent errors.

Additional details:

ArcGIS Enterprise 11.1.0, fully patched

Geodatabase is running on SQL Server 2019 in AWS RDS

Collaboration is syncing 16 feature services as copies. Each service contains a single layer from the geodatabase.

Sync issue is intermittent between layers, but the most frequent errors appear to be with the parcel layers.

Thanks!

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

ahargreaves_FW — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 15:23:16 GMT

Go check your portal logs. Perhaps you are exceeding the 1GB limit on collaborations that the doc fails to tells you about?

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

tmichael_wpjwa — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 15:30:32 GMT

I'm familiar with those errors, and have encountered them before when first learning about collaborations, but I'm not getting them in this case. Appreciate the suggestion though!

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

tmichael_wpjwa — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 11:17:03 GMT

Since the original message I have also changed the following settings to see if any changed the behavior:

- In ArcGIS Server Manager, adjusted the shared instanced settings > number of shared instances per machine from 4 to 8.

- Increased the Maximum Instances of the SyncTools service to 6.

- Changed the services that are included in the error messages most often from shared to dedicated instances.

None of these changes seem to have made a difference.

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

DamonNelton — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 18:16:22 GMT

Any updates on this topic - We are having similar issues. When we first set everything up it worked but then the Syncing stopped working. We never changed anything so unclear why?. Our errors are similar to these. Thanks Damon

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

tmichael_wpjwa — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 18:44:54 GMT

No updates. I ended up building my own "monitoring" tools in an ArcGIS Notebook that sends me the collaboration status (error messages) once a day, and the same layers consistently fail. As I mentioned above the layers that fail most frequently are also layers that don't change very often, so I haven't been too concerned about it. Also, I'm currently blocked from fully leveraging a distributed collaboration for my purposes by the 1GB feature layer size limit, so I haven't really felt a need to pursue these errors much further if this isn't the solution I'll be using.

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

AmyRoust — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 17:50:32 GMT

There is a bug in Enterprise 11.1 for multi-machine deployments that is fixed in 11.3:

113-IssuesAddressedList_06112024.pdf (esri.com)

In addition to edit sync failures, I was getting a lot of those generic "failed to export item" errors while still on Enterprise 11.1. Upgrading to 11.3 resolved my issue.

One other thing to check: make sure that you aren't hiding any fields in your attribute table. In particular, the sync needs all of the editor tracking fields as well as global ID. I got that generic error many times when I had hidden those fields from the attribute table before publishing to Portal.

Good luck!

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

tmichael_wpjwa — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 19:14:07 GMT

Thanks for sending, I hadn't seen that. That doesn't apply to me specifically because I'm running a single-machine deployment, but it gives me hope at least that the issue will resolve itself after we upgrade to 11.3. I'm looking to perform that upgrade this fall.

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

AmyRoust — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:12:23 GMT

Here's another issue that I ran into today. I have a user named gis_viewer in our SQL database that I was using to connect to the enterprise database with my data. I can publish services to Portal with that database connection, but it's missing a permission that will prevent the data from copying via the collaboration. I don't know what the permission is, but I think it requires more than SELECT. Maybe someone from Esri like @ReeseFacendini can provide the link to that resource?

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

KerwinTalbot_marysvilleWA — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 18:37:28 GMT

For what it's worth you are not the only one having issues with DC repeatedly failing. I've had repeated failings and have gone through about 4 support cases to no avail. Within the past month I've set up a brand new collaboration only to have it completely fail for seemingly no reason. When going through portal logs I'll get the usual mix of errors:

SyncReplica failed while exporting featureLayer or View item 'abc' for destination portal '123'. 'com.esri.gw.collaboration.SynchronizeReplicaException: Failed to synchronize a replica on hosted feature layer

or simply just

Failed to export item 'abc' into a replication package : 'Exporting item failed'

Needless to say I have 0 faith in the stability of distributed collaboration and its utility as a means of copying data from one environment to another. Hopefully this becomes something ESRI can investigate and at least provide more actionable and meaningful diagnostic messages.

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

tmichael_wpjwa — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 19:32:36 GMT

Yeah, it seems like a promising technology with a couple of frustrating shortcomings. For my purposes I still cannot fully leverage a distributed collaboration because of the limitation on the size of the output hosted feature layers. If this were increased from 1 GB to 5 GB or so I think I'd be all in.

As far as reliability goes I still receive the "Exporting item failed" messages daily for two of my layers but it hasn't been worth my time to take it up with support. Aside from that, it seems like it's been pretty reliable for me and it even survived without any hiccups when I upgraded my ArcGIS Enterprise environment from 11.1 to 11.3.

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

JimCarmichael1 — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 15:45:24 GMT

Agreed. We are on 11.3 and the copying of data from portal to AGOL is full of errors and inconsistencies when using distributed collaboration.

Re: Distributed Collaboration - how to troubleshoot "Exporting item failed" errors

EricKriener — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:07:29 GMT

yuuuuuuuppp....this sync thing is just short of hot garbage...