Sitecore 10.1 SOLR App Service

December 16, 2021

Setting up SOLR on an App Service is convenient to manage if you are using App Services for the rest of your Sitecore resources. There is a good article here for setting one up:

However, this isn't without issues. I've had 2 non-production SOLR services running in this fashion for a few months now but it isn't stable enough to deploy to production. Some of the issues I've experienced are with application insights and file locking.

Application Insights Causes the Application to Not Start

The first time I attempted to install SOLR on an App Service I checked the Add Application Insights option during Azure setup. After the resource was provisioned, the SOLR service wouldn't start until Application Insights was disabled. I found exceptions in the SOLR logs tracing back to application insights.

To see how I eventually enabled Application Insights, see:

SOLR Index File Lock Issues

Every couple of weeks the SOLR service experiences a file locking issue on one of the indexes it is trying to update. This issue causes issues in Sitecore (searches don't work and publishes fail). The simple fix is to restart the app; however, one of the answers on this question discusses a custom PowerShell job that could restart the app service if it found it erroring out.