Magento – Magento 2.1 Web setup wizard missing in backend

I had this problem once. Turned out one of the installed extensions tried to "phone home" on each admin-page-load to a server that was no longer maintained - so the request this server had to time out before the actual admin page was rendered.

The extension I used back then was Robogento_RichSnippets.

I found this error by disabling all extensions in codepool "local" in the local.xml file, and suddenly the backend was fast again. After that, I re-enabled the extensions one for one.

As you noted this has been confirmed as an issue on Github here: github.com/magento/magento2/issues/5247

However this has been closed as it is a duplicate of: https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/4159

This issue thread also details a workaround until the fix is merged into the next Magento release, which is to switch your webserver root to that of the Magento root path, not the /pub subdirectory.

I have verified this works on CE 2.1 (you need to clean cache after this change), however I would personally not recommend using this workaround on a production environment as is less secure.