Reporting services – The request failed with HTTP status 503 Service Unavailable

The other day, I have powered ON my Configuration Manager lab after long a time to test something on the reporting and found that, the reporting URL does not work.

Browsing the reports URL leads to service unavailable with http error 503, The service unavailable.

I have verified that, the SQL server reporting services is running fine and i have restarted the service as well to check if this works or not but no luck.

I have realized that, there is something seriously wrong and took sometime to troubleshoot further.

The first log to check is srsrp.log (ConfigMgr log) for reporting services located in your configMgr installation directory\logs folder.

The log has the following errors:

The request failed with HTTP status 503: Service Unavailable.

(!) SRS not detected as running

Failures reported during periodic health check by the SRS Server CMserver.domain.name

I have also checked the reporting server configuration manager, everything seems to be fine.

The next is to look at the SQL server reporting services log located in

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services\SSRS\LogFiles

The log has the following error messages:

configmanager!DefaultDomain!5018!04/04/2021-14:23:28:: e ERROR: Error loading configuration file: The evaluation period for this instance of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services has expired.  A license is now required.

appdomainmanager!DefaultDomain!5018!04/04/2021-14:23:28:: e ERROR: Appdomain:1 DefaultDomain failed to initialize. Error: Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.ServerConfigurationErrorException: The report server has encountered a configuration error.  ---> Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.EvaluationCopyExpiredException: The evaluation period for this instance of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services has expired.  A license is now required..

AS you can see in the log, the license has expired for SQL server reporting services.

When you install the SQL server reporting services, you will be asked for the trail of 180 days or input the license key of the SQL server.

If you choose trail, then after 180 days, you will have the same issue like mine.

So now, we found that, the license for the SQL server reporting services is expired, how do we activate it now?

The only way that I could find is to reinstall the reporting services.

Run the SQL server reporting services installation wizard (I did 2019), you will see the following options. Choose upgrade, you will be asked for the key to activate it.

Once the installation is completed, wait for the reporting services to check the license status and rebuild the reports (there wont be any changes your default/custom reports) and after sometime, your reporting URL will be up and running.

hope this helps!