503 Service Unavailable When Accessing a Website (Platform Portal or Guest Application)

Issue

A customer reported that they received a server error 503 when accessing the Account Portal for Apprenda.

Cause

After further investigation, it was discovered that the Application Pool was stopped on the server hosting the website.

Troubleshooting Steps

In order to troubleshoot this issue and find the stopped application pool, simply follow these steps:

1. Log in to the SOC (http://apps.XXX/soc). If the SOC is the website that is hitting a 503 go to step 1 on section 2.  
2. Click on the Applications link on the top navigation bar.
3. Search for the application that is having issues.
4. Click on the version link for that application.
5. The Application Details page will show which servers are hosting the application's websites.

Once you have located the servers that are hosting the website follow these steps:

1. Log in to that web server.
2. Open IIS Manager.
3. Click on Application Pools and start the application pool for that application.

NOTE: While this will resolve this issue, it is important for the platform operator to investigate why the application pool died in the first place by looking at the Windows Event Logs.