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Troubleshooting

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padams edited this page May 11, 2020 · 10 revisions

This page outlines ways to troubleshoot OWA installations. Please try these steps BEFORE filing support issues.

Installation Issues

The most common causes of problems/errors during installation relate to how your server environment is setup.

  1. Read the Technical Requirements and make sure that you are running supported version of PHP and MySql.
  2. OWA uses cookies for tracking and for logging not the the admin interface. Therefor you must run OWA under a fully qualified domain (FQD) such as my.domain.com. Accessing and running OWA under http://localhost or an IP address will create errors.
  3. OWA needs to write out its config file snd certain cache files. Make sure the directory that you are installing OWA into is writable by whatever user your web server is running under.
  4. OWA needs access to a MySql database. Double check that your MySql database is accessible and that the login that your configure OWA to use has the ability to create and alter tables.
  5. Make sure that the public URL you specified in your owa-config.php file is correct and uses the correct protocol (http or https).
  6. Make sure you followed all steps to checkout the project from Github if you don´t using an packaged release https://github.com/Open-Web-Analytics/Open-Web-Analytics/wiki/Installing-from-Github (Check if there is an vendor directory)

Tracking Issues (javascript tracker)

These steps are helpful for debugging situations where OWA was installed correctly but tracking data is not being recorded or showing up in reporting.

  1. The Javascript tracker must be accessible to browsers. Try to load the URL to your owa.tracker-combined.min.js file directly in your browser.

  2. If the tracker file is reachable then ensure that you are properly including the tracking tag on each page of your web app that you want OWA to track. To tell if the tracking is being includes simply "view Source" of your website and search for "owa".

  3. If the tag is being inserted properly then open your browser's "inspector" tool and look for any javascript errors that might be occurring.

  4. If you don't see any JavaScript errors, switch to the inspector's "network" tab and then reload your webpage. If the tracker is working then you should see one or more requests to log.php in the network inspector. If you don't see a request to log.php that means the tracker is not sending data to OWA on the server and you should double check that the tag is inserted properly and that there are no javascript errors.

  5. If you see the log.php request being made by the browser, note the HTTP response code.

    • If the response code is 200 then all is well.
    • If it is 500, then OWA is not installed correctly.
    • If it is 404, then the public URL in your tracker tag is pointing to the wrong place.

  6. If log.php requests result in a 200 HTTP response code but you are still not seeing any data, then try clearing your OWA cookies (specifically owa_v and owa_s). These cookies could be present from earlier debugging attempts and might be confusing OWA when it tries to process the tracking requests made by log.php.

  7. If log.php requests result in a 200 HTTP response code but you are still not seeing any data, then ensure you are using the correct site ID in your tracking tag, and viewing that particular site ID in the reporting interface (top left pulldown menu on each report).

  8. If there's still no requests in the network tab make sure your browser does not send doNotTrack properties.

General Debugging

OWA generated a lot of debugging information for ever request it receives. Here's how to access that info:

  1. Turn on debugging mode by uncommenting define('OWA_ERROR_HANDLER', 'development'); in your owa_config.php file. Debugging output will beginning on the next tracking or admin request.

  2. View the debug output in OWA's error log file located at `/path/to/owa/owa-data/logs/errors_xxxxxxx.txt

  3. OWA's error log file will contain a step by step walk-through of exactly what steps OWA is performing for each request. Find the request you re looking for (usually the last one), and see if there are any errors present or exactly where OWA is getting stuck.

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