Accruent MC Error Message
Service unavailable or 503 error

Depending on your browser, the display and wording may vary. May be a white page or a dinosaur cartoon or other decorated page. Behind the scenes it is a 503.* error.

Common variations include:

  • "503 Service Unavailable"
  • "HTTP Error 503"
  • "Service Unavailable"
  • "503 Error"
  • "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable"
  • "Error 503 Service Unavailable"

It COULD be Cloudflare, but very unlikely. Cloudflare is not on your server, it's between your cloud and your server. Cloud flare will usually give different errors, not a 503. More often a 4xx series like 403 'forbidden' from cloud flare. But it COULD be Cloudflare that is down resulting temporarily in a 503 error.

DLLs missing or damaged (Damaged is fairly uncommon these days - hard drive corruption, but it can still be the reason)

uninstalled dot net

You uninstalled the version of dot net core that MC is using. (This is the most common - done by IT people as a 'clean up' or done by a change in your virus checker)

shared app pool

app pool set up wrong

web.config has invalid values (or is unreadable)

MCe 503:

  • shared app pool
  • deleted DLL
  • possibly if you uninstall everything connected to dot net, asp.net shim that makes dot net in IIS work. ASP.NET hosting bundle, just download the newest. We ship one in our prereq directory, but just grab the newest - it may be better. (Noting MC requires their then current required version(s) of Dot net for that version, so a system with both MC and MCe you will need the correct one for them.)

This can happen for example when you are logging in, where you successfully loaded the HTML or the App, but then got an error logging in.

This can happen when are using Accruent's MC and all of a sudden all you get is 503 errors.

It is very unlikely to be reported when using MCe because MCe is designed to run much of it's functionality offline, and it is very 'patient' when the server isn't running, and 503 is one of the 'your server isn't running' error messages.

If this is down during maintenance and you are using MCe, you will won't even notice it unless you are doing operations that require the server. If you are using a product that isn't designed for offline and it is during scheduled maintenance ... be patient!

Otherwise...

If you get this using our SaaS, you need to contact us (or the provider of your SaaS if we aren't your SaaS provider!) We do have monitoring so that if this ever happens we will be notified, but better to be safe and notify us in case we don't know yet.

// are you on our SaaS or on Prem?

You are a SaaS customer if you access MC through a URL like one of these (where * means "any value") https://*.mycmms.ca or https://*.mcc-on.ca or https://*.maintenanceconnection.ca . Most other URLs means that your IT department or someone in your company controls the server(s) that your MC/MCe system is sitting on.

If you are on prem, you need to contact your IT department to get it fixed.

503 means 'Service not available".

IIS may be running. But 503 means the App pool is not run (or someone broke the installation.) The MC app pool turned off would be the first thing to check.

Very specifically, this is not an error that the application itself is returning, but something between you and the application.

A firewall can cause a 503 Service Unavailable error if its rules are too strict, misconfigured, or mistakenly identify legitimate traffic.

Did you recently set up Cloudflare? You may have set it to restrictive. If you are only getting a the 503 on API calls, something like Cloudflare setup incorrectly (the defaults are incorrect for an app like ours), that could be the cause.

It often means something has been shut down on your server.

If it happens for awhile and then goes away, your IT department was probably running some sort of upgrade and your App Pool was turned off at the time you tried to connect.

The most common time we hear from customers is when it is on the weekend or in the evening and their IT department was doing something thinking 'now is probably a safe time to do it.'

A 503 is not, can NOT be caused by SQL Server. Problems with it may return errors like a 500.

It could be that IIS ran out of memory and stopped the App pool.

It could be that IIS ran out of hard drive space and stopped the app pool.

It could be that IIS or the App pool is misconfigured, but this would be more common in a new setup than a point in time where you'd be looking at a help file like this. If it IS happening on a new setup or change to IIS - start by assuming you set something wrong.

It can happened because an Antivirus removed critical files. We have had cases where a company's Antivirus decided that one or more of the files in the applications is a virus and keeps deleting it every time you reinstall it. So if you have had to reinstall to fix the problem and it occurs again - suspect an antivirus or an over eager IT person who is searching for files that they found on some list are 'bad' files. The dot net core files are sometimes a victim of this type of thinking.

Specifically 503 means: The call is NOT being responded to by the app, it is IIS itself, obviously still running, saying that the app isn't even there (running) to respond to the request.

It is possible that the login page of Accruent MC may be being delivered because it is 'just' an HTML page and not required to be part of the App pool. So if the App pool is shut down it may be possible, perhaps based on setup, that the Login Page didn't have to be in cache, but was delivered by IIS outside the App pool.