Problem

You may be instructed by Atlassian Support to generate a thread dump using the jstack tool on a Windows platform.  This error is thrown when trying to execute the command.

Cause

Jstack only allows you to connect to JVM's running in the same user context.  Many people use a service wrapper to start their products: this puts the JVM in the Local System Account user context.  Since this special account has no login shell, you won't be able to force a thread dump normally.

Workaround

Workaround 1:

Change the service wrapper to use another account.  Do this from Services>Apache Tomcat Confluence>Properties.

Workaround 2:

Use Psexec to execute the jstack command as the relevant user.  

psexec -s "%JAVA_HOME%\bin\jstack.exe" PID >stack.txt 

Workaround 3:

Follow the Live Monitoring Using the JMX Interface directions and set up a JMX monitoring tool like visualVM acting remotely on the JVM.  Many of these tools can generate thread dumps externally.