Search was stuck on Paused for:External request even though I tried to resume it via powershell

Question

Yesterday I performed a SharePoint update and I had to stop Search Service Application via powershell. I disabled the sptimer and spsearch on Windows Services.

After the update was complete I turned sptimer and spearch in Windows services and then tried to resume the Search Application service. I had to leave the script running for an hour and when I returned back, I saw it had finished, but the Search administrative status was still showing: "Paused for: external request".

Resume-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication -Identity "SAS"

Using get-spenterprisesearchstatus -SearchApplication $ssa -Detailed -Text I got the following details which to me seem alright. There seem to be no problem with search.

Name      : IndexComponent1
State     : Active
Primary   : True
Partition : 0
Host      : srv02

Name      : Cell:IndexComponent1-SP6aBbaacad462I.0.0
State     : Active
Primary   : True
Partition : 0

Name  : Partition:0
State : Active

Name  : AdminComponent1
State : Active
Host  : srv02

Name  : QueryProcessingComponent1
State : Active
Host  : srv02

Name  : ContentProcessingComponent1
State : Active
Host  : srv02

Name  : AnalyticsProcessingComponent1
State : Active
Host  : srv02

Name  : CrawlComponent0
State : Active
Host  : srv02

However, I decided to do a Search reset using the following script:

$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
Resume-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication $ssa
$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
$disableAlerts = $true
$ignoreUnreachableServer = $true
$ssa.reset($disableAlerts, $ignoreUnreachableServer)

Now, after more than 7 hours, the Search status is set to: "Paused for:External request, Index reset".

I wonder why it is taking so long since it is a TEST environment? How can I check what is happening behind the screens since the script has not finished yet?

Update:

$ssa = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication
$ssa.IsPaused() -ne 0
True
($ssa.IsPaused() -band 0x80) -ne 0
True
($ssa.IsPaused() -band 0x100) -ne 0
True

Based on the code above: 0x80 - An administrator has manually paused the Search service application. 0x100 - The search index is being deleted.

How can I see if the index is really being deleted?

Answer 1

I ran into a very similar issue with search being paused after an update.

It seemed one of our search service instances was stuck in "Provisioning" mode.

Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceInstance -Local
TypeName    : SharePoint Server Search
Description : Index content and serve search queries
Id          : 9a59e3dd-67c6-463b-85af-cdd20be211ac
Server      : SPServer Name=SPSERVER01
Service     : SearchService Name=OSearch15
Role        : None
Status      : Provisioning

After running the commands below we were able to un-pause search, and reset the index.

$instance = Get-SPServiceInstance -Identity <ID# of Instance stuck in Provisioning>
$instance.provision()
$instance.update()