Inactive User creating updates on Project 'Team Tab' in Clarity

Products

• Clarity PPM SaaS
• Clarity PPM On Premise

Issue/Introduction

The Team Tab of a Project is showing recent updates from a user who is no longer Active in Clarity, in the field "Last Updated By."

They are originating from a user who has left the company, and whose user record is both Inactive and Locked.
The source of these updates is not known.
There are no Jobs against this user's name shown in the Job Logs.

​This query enabled us to identify each time the issue occurred:

SELECT DISTINCT
        (inv.code) AS Project_CODE,
        inv.name AS PROJECT_NAME,
        abc.user_name AS USER_NAME,
        abc.FIRST_NAME,
        abc.LAST_NAME,
        team.last_updated_date
FROM inv_investments inv
JOIN prteam team
    ON inv.id = team.prprojectid
INNER JOIN cmn_sec_users abc
    ON inv.manager_id = abc.id
WHERE team.last_updated_by = 5104008
AND team.last_updated_date
BETWEEN TO_DATE('2018/03/01', 'yyyy/mm/dd') AND
                 TO_DATE('2018/06/19', 'yyyy/mm/dd')

 

Where "team.last_updated_by" is the ID of the user (Resource) who is Inactive and who shows against the Last Modified By date.
And the date range allows you to narrow down the results to a current time period.

A result here indicates that an update has been made by the nominated user.
Inactive users should not be making entries.
Note that this query does not check whether the user is Active or Inactive. 

Cause

The root cause is that a Job had become orphaned. 

It was still running, but not visible through the user interface.

The root cause trigger is not known. It was investigated in detail from the backend of queries run, and a regular cause was not identified.

We theorise that a Job became stuck while the user status was changed while a Job was processing.

Resolution

This has been addressed by: 

1) Cleanly shutting down all known active Jobs. 
2) Clearing all orphaned Jobs 
3) Recycling the Background Server. 

These two documents were used as the reference source: 

a) How to cleanup processes in Aborting State 
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=71773 

b) Scheduled jobs not processed by the job scheduler (BG service Issue)
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?articleId=49034

If a Clarity SaaS site encounters this issue, please contact CA Support to run the above procedures.
A Clarity On-Premise site may run through the steps directly.

NOTE: Common, valid causes should be investigated and ruled out first. The most common is that when a user starts a Job, this is visible to themselves, but not to an Administrator looking into the general Job queue through the interface. You would need to log in as that user to see their Jobs. (Or else deep dive into running Jobs on a production system, which is not typically practical.)