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Manage the Akamas Server

This section is a collection of different topics related to how to manage the Akamas Server.

This section covers some topics on how to manage the Akamas Server:

Akamas logs
Audit logs
Install upgrades and patches

Akamas logs

Akamas allows dumping log entries from a specific service, workspace, workflow, study, trial, and experiment, for a specific timeframe and at different log levels.

Akamas CLI for logs

Akamas logs can be dumped via the following CLI command:

akamas log

This command provides many filters which can be retrieved with the following command:

akamas log --help

which should return

For example, to get the list of the most recent Akamas errors:

akamas log -l ERROR

which should return something similar to:

Audit logs

Akamas audit logs

Akamas stores all its logs into an internal Elasticsearch instance: some of these logs are reported to the user in the GUI in order to ease the monitoring of workflow executions, while other logs are only accessible via CLI and are mostly used to provide more context and information to support requests.

Audit access can be performed by using the CLI in order to extract logs related to UI or API access. For instance, to extract audit logs from the last hour use the following commands:

UI Logs

API Logs

Notice: to visualize the system logs unrelated to the execution of workflows bound to workspaces, you need an account with administrative privileges.

Storing audit logs into files

To ease the integration with external logging systems, Akamas can be configured to store access logs into files. To enable this feature you should:

Create a logs folder next to the Akamas docker-compose.yml file
Edit the docker-compose.yml file by modifying the line FILE_LOG: "false" to FILE_LOG: "true"

otherwise, start Akamas first.

When the user interacts with the UI or the API Akamas will report detailed access logs both on the internal database and in a file in the logs folder. To ease log rolling and management every day Akamas will create a new file named according to the pattern access-%{+YYYY-MM-dd}.log.

Install upgrades and patches

Akamas patches and upgrades need to be installed by following the specific instructions specified in the package provided. In case of new releases, it is recommended to read the related Release Notes. Under normal circumstances, this usually requires the user to update the docker-compose configuration, as described in the next section.

Docker compose Configuration

When using docker compose to install Akamas, there’s a folder usually named akamas in the user home folder that contains a docker-compose.yml file. This is a YAML text file that contains a list of docker services with the URLs/version pointing to the ECR repo hosting all docker images needed to launch Akamas.

Here’s an excerpt of such a docker-compose.yml file (this example contains 3 services only):

The relevant lines that usually have to be patched during an upgrade are the lines with key "image" like:

In order to update to a new version you should replace the versions (1.7.0 or 2.3.0) after the colon with the new versions (ask your Akamas support for the correct service versions for a specific Akamas release) then you should restart Akamas with the following console commands: First login to Akamas CLI with:

and type username and password as in the example below

Now make sure you have the following AWS variables with the proper value in your Linux user environment:

Then log in to AWS with the following command:

Then pull all new ECR images for the new service versions you just changed (this should be done from when inside the same folder where file docker-compose.yml resides, usually $HOME/akamas/) with the following command:

It should return an output like the following:

Finally, relaunch all services with:

(usage example below)

Wait for a few minutes and check the Akamas services are back up by running the command:

The expected output should be like the following (repeat the command after a minute or two if the last line is not "OK" as expected):

Monitor the Akamas Server

External tools

You can use any monitoring tool to check the availability of the Akamas instance.

Checking Akamas services

To check the status of the Akams services please run akamas status -d to identify which service is not able to start up correctly

Here is an example of output:

Backup & Recover of the Akamas Server

Akamas server backup

The process of backing up an Akamas server can be divided in two parts, that is system backup and otherwise start Akamas. Backup can be performed in any way you see fit: they’re just regular files so you can use any backup tool.

System backup

System services are hosted on AWS ECR repo so the only thing that fully defines a working Akamas application is the docker-compose.yml file. Performing a backup of the Akamas application is as simple as copying this single file to your backup location. you may schedule any script that performs this weekly or at any frequency you see fit

User data backup

You may list all existing Akamas studies via the Akamas CLI command:

Then you can export all existing studies one by one via the CLI command

where UUID is the UUID of a single study. This command exports into a single archive file (tar.gz). These archive files can be backed up to your favorite backup folder.

Akamas server recovery

Akamas server recovery involves recovering the system backup, restarting the Akamas service then re-importing the studies.

System Restore

To restore the system you must recover the original docker-compose.yml then launch the command

from the folder where you placed this YAML file and then wait for the system to come up, by checking it with the command

User data restore

All studies can be re-imported singularly with the CLI command (referring to the correct pathname of the archive):