Load Balancer Admin Troubleshooting

Overview

This guide covers platform-level load balancer issues requiring administrator access — service agent failures, appliance provisioning problems, and capacity-related performance degradation.

Administrator Access Required — This operation requires the admin role. Contact your Polystack administrator if you do not have sufficient permissions.

For user-facing issues (PENDING_CREATE status, member OFFLINE, TLS errors), see the Load Balancer User Troubleshooting guide.

Service Not Responding

Load balancer API service unavailable

Cause: The load balancer API service or worker containers may be stopped.Diagnose:

Check all load balancer service containers

docker ps --filter name=octavia

Check container logs for errors:

View API container logs

docker logs octavia_api --tail 100

View worker/health manager logs

docker logs octavia_worker --tail 100
docker logs octavia_health_manager --tail 100

Resolution: Restart services via the deployment console:

Restart load balancer services

ironcore-ansible deploy --tags octavia

RabbitMQ connectivity lost

Cause: The load balancer worker cannot connect to the message queue, preventing it from receiving provisioning commands.Diagnose:

Check RabbitMQ connectivity from worker

docker exec octavia_worker python3 -c "
import pika
conn = pika.BlockingConnection(pika.URLParameters('amqp://octavia:<password>@<host>:5672/'))
print('RabbitMQ connection OK')
conn.close()
"

Resolution: Verify RabbitMQ is running and the octavia user credentials are correct.

Appliance Provisioning Failures

Appliance provisioning fails — DHCP pool exhausted

Cause: The management network DHCP pool has no available IP addresses.Diagnose:

Check DHCP pool usage

openstack subnet show lb-management-subnet \
  -c allocation_pools -c dns_nameservers

Count current appliance IPs in use

openstack loadbalancer amphora list \
  -c lb_network_ip | grep -v None | wc -l

Resolution: Expand the DHCP pool by updating the management subnet allocation range:

Update DHCP pool range

openstack subnet set \
  --allocation-pool start=<new-start>,end=<new-end> \
  lb-management-subnet

Appliance image unavailable

Cause: The appliance image is not registered in the Image Service, or it has been deactivated.Diagnose:

Check appliance image availability

openstack image list --tag amphora

Resolution: If the image is missing, re-upload it:

Upload amphora image

openstack image create \
  --disk-format qcow2 \
  --container-format bare \
  --file amphora-x64-haproxy.qcow2 \
  --tag amphora \
  --public \
  amphora-image

Performance Degradation

High latency through load balancer

Cause: Appliance compute resources are saturated, or the backend member count has grown beyond the flavor profile’s rated capacity.Diagnose: Check appliance statistics for connection counts:

Check load balancer connection statistics

openstack loadbalancer stats show <lb-name>

Compare active_connections against the flavor profile’s rated capacity.Resolution: Create a new load balancer with a higher-capacity flavor and migrate listeners:

Flavor profiles cannot be changed on existing load balancers. To upgrade capacity:

Create a new load balancer with the target flavor
Recreate all listeners, pools, and members on the new load balancer
Update DNS / floating IP to point to the new load balancer
Delete the original load balancer after traffic is migrated

Service Log Reference

Container	Log command
Load balancer API	`docker logs octavia_api --tail 100`
Worker	`docker logs octavia_worker --tail 100`
Health manager	`docker logs octavia_health_manager --tail 100`
Housekeeping	`docker logs octavia_housekeeping --tail 100`

Next Steps

Monitoring

Set up proactive monitoring to catch issues before they impact production.

Flavor Profiles

Create higher-capacity flavor profiles for workloads experiencing saturation.

Architecture

Review the component relationships that can cause cascading failures.

Security

Verify management plane isolation after resolving connectivity issues.

Core Services

Other Services

Overview

Service Not Responding

Appliance Provisioning Failures

Performance Degradation

Service Log Reference

Next Steps

Monitoring

Flavor Profiles

Architecture

Security

​Overview

​Service Not Responding

​Appliance Provisioning Failures

​Performance Degradation

​Service Log Reference

​Next Steps

Monitoring

Flavor Profiles

Architecture

Security

Overview

Service Not Responding

Appliance Provisioning Failures

Performance Degradation

Service Log Reference

Next Steps