Why is my Synthetic ActiveGate shutting down?

[HannahM]

Self Service Summary

Troubleshooting steps for when a Synthetic-enabled ActiveGate is running but the Synthetic Engine Status is showing as shutting down. Seen in Deployment Status> ActiveGates

Chromium

The most common cause of this behaviour is an old version of Chromium. Dynatrace supports Chromium versions that are no more than two versions behind the latest Dynatrace-supported version for a specific ActiveGate release. Chromium can be manually updated using the instructions here.

Also, if Chromium version shows as 80.0.0000.00 then the Synthetic Module in unable to recognise the version, so an update of Chromium version will also be required.

Activegate and Synthetic Module mismatch

Check if the Synthetic and ActiveGate major versions match. In the image above they do not. 

If the major versions are different, check this article  for why the Synthetic module failed to update. 

Log Messages

Download the logs from the ActiveGate using the ActiveGate diagnostics feature, otherwise you will need to check on the machine itself.  /var/log/dynatrace/synthetic or %PROGRAMDATA%\dynatrace\synthetic\log  

Check the vuc.log, vuc-http.log and vuc-browser.logs. 

1. Check for DIAGNOSTICS TEST in vuc-http.log and vuc-browser.log to see if the modules were able to start up. If the diagnostics test failed, check the lines above for the cause.
   1. If the vuc-http.log shows DIAGNOSTICS TEST HAS FAILED! HTTPSCRIPT MONITORING MODULE IS NOT OPERATIONAL! RESTARTING VUC! , check additional log files with stdout/stderr output in executors subdir and vuc-http.debug.log.
   2. If the vuc-browser.log shows DIAGNOSTICS TEST HAS FAILED! BROWSER MONITORING MODULE IS NOT OPERATIONAL! RESTARTING VUC!, check the vuc-browser.debug.log. 
      If you see Running as root without --no-sandbox is not supported.then the issue is likely related to the user running the Synthetic Engine. This should be run by dtuserag and not root. Reinstalling the ActiveGate will correct this behaviour. 
2. Check for ERRORs or WARNINGs.

Windows Machines

1. check the OS is supported. For instance, we do not support Windows 2012 (R2) and from 1.263 found that this causes the VUC to show this shutting down status. This is due to Google stopping support for Chrome on Windows 2012 (R2) with Chrome 109. https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7100626?hl=en

2. Check if there have been any recent Windows updates, like this one that prevented Chrome from starting up. 
3. Check if the Activegate machine has any anti-virus/ anti-malware installed. If it does, reboot the machine.
   As outlined in our documentation, Synthetic-enabled ActiveGates on Windows hosts are not supported with any anti-virus or anti-malware software installed, as this may cause conflicts with the Dynatrace software, leading to issues such as this.  

Contact Chat

If none of the previous steps resolved the issue, then open a chat and provide the Support Archive from the ActiveGate the troubleshooting steps you have already completed.