Debugging the Partner Solution templates is never easy, because deployment can fail midway through stack creation. Here are some helpful approaches:

  • Use a debug/verbose flag as input to generate additional logging.
  • It’s always best to explicitly signal in order to properly control the flow of the deployment. You can do this by calling cfn-signal with the wait condition handle or resource.
  • Disable the Rollback on failure option before stack creation so that you have a partially working stack and can access the log files.
    The customer incurs charges for whatever has been deployed up to the point of failure.

  • If the stack fails, check these logs for Amazon EC2 issues:

    • cloud-init
    • cfn

    These logs are published on the Amazon EC2 instance in the /var/log/ directory. They capture processes and command outputs while AWS CloudFormation is setting up your instance. For Windows, you can view the EC2Configure service and cfn logs in %ProgramFiles%\Amazon\EC2ConfigService and C:\cfn\log.

  • Check application logs, if available, for workload-specific issues.

For more information about troubleshooting your Partner Solution templates, refer to Troubleshooting CloudFormation.