Starting the Debug option in Metastorm

Hi,

There are times when you'd have installed Metastorm on your System but would not be able to see the Debug Option under that. The following steps needs to be performed for letting the debug option to be working in Metastorm.

Those who are not able to see the Debug Option in Metastorm, please ensure that you have first have the ProcessDiagnostics Service with you. This you can see through going to IIS -> Default WebSite.
If you have performed the step 1 and then also you are not able to debug your application then go to ComputerManagement-> EventViewer->Application and see the logs.
You will see a Failure Audit Log where it would be showing “Login failed for user ‘USER_NAME’. Ensure that this user is added in your sql server under sysadmin account.
Your Debug Option will start working.

Happy Coding..

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Comments

Todd_Greve

Thanks Amitabh, some other things to add to this as I also found myself troubleshooting this recently ...

If after installing the v9 SR you don't see the debug the three reasons I know of you won't get the debug option are

You didn't go back after applying the SR and change the Metastorm installation (Programs and Features in Control Panel) and install the new components for diagnostics. THey are not installed by default when applying the Service Release.
Visual Studio isn't installed on the machine
The designer can't reach the database through the new diagnostics service. Either the URL isn't set correctly in the Designer Options to reach the service (default is the localhost on the local machine), or the connection string won't allow you to get to the database

If using Integrated Windows Authentication you may not want to have the Network Service given sysadmin to the DB, so you can also change the application pool (IIS7) to use your application account that the engine is running under as the account the MetastormDiagnosticsAppPool is running with.Alternatively you can change the connection string in the web.config to use a SQL account and non-Integrated Windows Authentication (I believe).

If the debug option is visible but disabled, this will be either you don't have a solution open, or if you haven't connected to the BPM repository (you may need to either deploy first, or connect through the repository pane).

Tony Lam

I had similar issue with the debug button:

The “Debug” appears on the menu tab of the designer when it first loads but disappears as soon as the designer finishes loading.

I also received the following warning message:

“Can't access Process Diagnostic Service information. Process debugging will be unavailable. Possible reason – missing permissions for current user.”

Like Todd had mentioned above, check and make sure your application pool security "MetastormDiagnosticAppPool" has been set correctly. I believe by default it uses the "NETWORK SERVICES" account.

I changed it to use the same account as the engine and was able to get the debug button back.

Thanks again you two.

Paul Denton

For this error message:

“Can't access Process Diagnostic Service information. Process debugging will be unavailable. Possible reason – missing permissions for current user.”

The Process Diagnostic Service is trying to access the Metastorm DB repository and it is using Window Authentication (when you are using MSSQL). This means the AppPool account it is running as will be permissions in the Metastorm repository. This is not likely to be true for the Network Service user and why changing to the Metastorm service account could work. The key part is that the account needs access to the Metastorm DB.