Tag: adservers

Google Doubleclick DFP – Getting the Debug Console When Running in Asynchronous Mode

When trying to find out why a particular ad campaign isn’t being delivered as you thought it should, the DFP documentation indicates that you should apply “google_debug” to the URL and a new window show pop up with the debug information. After digging through documentation and searching Google for a couple of hours without getting this to work, I finally found the relevant part of the DFP documentation.

Here’s the kicker: in the new, improved ad handler (gpt.js) you’ll have to append “google_console=1” in your URL, then press CTRL+F10 to launch the debug console. No google_debug, no google_pubconsole, just google_console and CTRL+F10.

Hopefully this will help someone trying to find out by searching for relevant terms.

Debugging Missing Statistics in OpenAds (OpenX)

Our statistics in OpenAds had suddently gone missing in action, and I started suspecting a few errors we’d gotten earlier about fubar-ed MyISAM-tables. First, check out debug.log (or maintenance.log if you’re running a newer version than us) in the var-directory of your Openads-installation. The easiest thing to do here is to search for the string ’emergency’, which will be posted to the log each time something fails in MySQL. The MDB2 error message that is included will show you the error message from MySQL in one of the fields (about 15-25 lines down), which will give you the reason for the error (if MySQL is to blame).

Some tables had been marked as crashed in our MySQL-installation, so we had to find out what to fix. A quick run with myisamchk in the MySQL-data directory for the database gave us a few hints:

myisamchk *.MYI > /tmp/myisamcheckoutput

By redirecting the normal output you’ll just get the error messages to stderr (Openads has quite a few tables, so your console will fill up quite quick otherwise) (as stdout will be redirected to /tmp/myisamcheckoutput). You’ll also be able to check the output by using less on /tmp/myisamcheckoutput.

If any tables are having problems, you can run:

REPAIR TABLE ;

in your MySQL console, and the table should be repaired in the background. After doing this, it’s time to get maintenance back up and running again.

Run the maintenance.php file manually (or wait until it gets triggered within the next hour):

php /scripts/maintenance/maintenance.php