Support Article
Passivation errors on F5 health check
SA-36351
Summary
Pega is running on a two-node cluster with an F5 load balancer in front. F5 performs a health check for each node by addressing the URL: "http://servername:8080" (the Tomcat Manager home page) and expecting an HTTP 200 response. A large number of unauthenticated browser requestors (>700) created by the F5 health check are not passivated for several hours. Only when the health check is set to a simple ping does the issue disappear.
Error Messages
Not Applicable
Steps to Reproduce
Configure an F5 health check to test if a node is up by addressing the URLs given in the Description section.
Root Cause
A defect or configuration issue in the operating environment
Resolution
Here’s the explanation for the reported behavior:
The right approach is to use a service (for example, Service-REST) on the Pega side to handle the ping requests when defining health monitor on the F5 side. With Pega 7.1.9 and later releases, Pega comes with a built-in service called monitor.pingService. For Pega 7.1.8 and earlier releases, create your own Service-REST with an implementation similar to monitor.pingService.
Published May 2, 2017 - Updated October 8, 2020
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