No InitializeBESReportsDB.exe in 10.0.2

I installed 10.0.2 Server fresh install on Win2016 and afterwards the BES Root and WebUI (all local to the same server, remote SQL) work fine but BES WebReports doesn’t respond even though the service is running and I can see it listening on 8083. In the past I ran InitializeBESReportsDB.exe but that no longer exists (expected it to be in BigFix Enterprise\BES Server\BESReportsData).

Without that exe how do I initialize the WR DB?

Have you enabled debug logs for WR?
We had an issue when upgraded from 9.5.17 to 10.0.1 and the Support team confirmed that upgrade path was not supported,we have been waiting for this release to solve that problem but if that problem hasn’t really fixed we can’t have our WR service back.
We installed a standalone WR as workaround.

While I still don’t see the InitializeBESReportsDB.exe, the issue was that for the fresh install of WR to start up, I had to hit http://localhost:8080 (the http port,) not the https port (8083) that I was trying.

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The fact that you weren’t able to connect to https://localhost:8083 is unexpected, that URL is supposed to work. Moreover, connection to http://localhost:8080 is supposed to cause automatic redirection to https://localhost:8083. Should this behavior reproduce again with another fresh installation my suggestion would be to file a ticket to allow HCL Support investigating and trying to understand why this is not working as expected (I was unable to reproduce this unexpected behavior on my test environments).

For the InitializeBESReportsDB.exe thing, yes right, that file doesn’t exist anymore, so what you’re seeing (or better, what you’re not seeing) is expected. The DB initialization task that used to be accomplished through that exe is now accomplished directly through the BESWebReportsServer executable (with ad-hoc arguments).

Will do, thanks for the info. Incase ever needed, are the ad-hoc BESWebReportsServer.exe arguments documented anywhere?

No, they’re not documented, the background is that a manual initialization of the WebReports DB would only be necessary in case of a severe issue and so the idea would be to have recourse to it only under the guidance of HCL Support.

This was pretty poor decision/implementation! Just spent 4+ hours with a Sev1 case cause the upgrade failed to upgrade the BESReporting database leaving Web Reports with version mismatch error and without knowing how to reinitiate the reporting database…

For what is worth, it seems the functionality was actually built into the Web Reports executable (BESWebReportsServer.exe -initializeDB BESReporting LocalBESReportingServer users/passwords) but even with those all I saw were errors in the logs, but nonetheless it fixed the issue. I did ask HCL to produce documentation for the reinitialization functionality, so hopefully there will be something soon…

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Thank you for this post @ageorgiev … I was installing a new BigFix instance and I had an issue where the SQL Server collation was set incorrectly. That obviously needed correction and BigFix needed to be reinstalled, but upon reinstall, WebReports did not run properly (“a database error occurred” was all we got in the browser trying https://localhost:8083). I think that had something to do with specifying a userid and password for web reports to run under, which didn’t get cleared when we dropped the database. Anyway, after reinstalling BigFix, running the command you posted resolved the Web Reports issue.