Portal HA - Is there a url to check the status of machines to see which is primary/standby that doesn't require a token

[AnthonyRyanEQL]

Hi there,

I have an ArcGIS Enterprise 11.1 environment with Portal in HA inside AWS behind an ALB. My ALB routing for Portal is currently set to ONLY go to 1 machine (currently the primary) as defined by the target group in AWS. The reason for this setup is because I can't find a url that doesn't tell me the status of each machine to see who is primary or standby that doesn't require a token. I can't use the healthCheck endpoint as both machines will return {"status": "success"} as they are both functioning correctly.

This url requires a token https://<portal alb>/arcgis/portaladmin/machines/<portal machine>?f=pjson to work but gives me the information I need.

Has anybody come across this or come up with a workable solution?

Thanks

[AngusHooper1]

I have encountered this issue before and the solution was to present a simple custom web page which could handle a healthcheck request. One issue we saw in particular is that the ALB expects a 400 error (or similar) to fail-over but the error page(s) from portal or server would return 200 despite "the arcgis server is down" being the contents.

[JonathanQuinn]

Why not just add both portal machines to the target group? Even though portal has a primary and standby concept, both machines can accept and respond to requests. There's no need for administrators to know which is primary and only send traffic to the primary.

[AnthonyRyanEQL]

Jonathan,

I originally did have both portal machines in the ALB target group but the machine with the secondary database kept failing requests so that's the reason I removed it from the target group and asked this question as i thought portal ha ran as active/failover. Now that I have a better understanding of Portal HA, I need to investigate why the second portal machine isn't processing requests, etc.

[JonathanQuinn]

Absolutely, that's a problem to address, not workaround. Did you recently patch the portals? There's a bug with patching an HA portal, specifically impacting the standby. The latest 11.1 patch is going to be re-issued to address the problem.

[AnthonyRyanEQL · Accepted solution]

Jonathan,

I did have the security patch installed which was out on the 6th July 2023 and just saw the notice from 2 days ago about the bug. Thanks for the information. Looks like I'm sitting back until it's released.

Thanks

[bilalalamgis]

You can find that which machine is primary and which is secondary by going to the following URL Sign In with portal admin 

https://webadaptorhost.domain.com/webadaptorname/portaladmin/machines

[AnthonyRyanEQL]

Thanks for the reply but this isn't what I was after. From above, I've already mentioned above that url and it requires a token (signed in) to be used so not really suitable with a ALB, etc and I have already accepted a solution.