Operations using Tomcat servlets (like Export and ticket attachment) fail and cause SOAP web services to fail whenever SOAP web services connects to slump before the local pdmweb slump entry exists

Products

• CA Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

When Service Desk Manager SOAP web services is being used, such as on an advanced availability application server which is not dedicated to only web services calls, then whenever Export is attempted, the export fails, subsequent Exports fail, and calls to web services start failing due to timeout:

Stopping and restarting Tomcat enables operations to resume; however, the issue may re-occur.  The issue reoccurs whenever SOAP web services connects to slump before the local pdmweb slump entry exists.

Note: Other operations such as attaching a file to ticket may have the same effect as Export.

Environment

Release : 17.2

Component : SERVICE DESK MANAGER

Cause

The "load-on-startup" parameter is probably missing from the web.xml of the SERVICEDESK Tomcat (i.e. "CA SD Tomcat" returned by pdm_status).

To confirm that the SDM Soap Web Services connected to slump first, check slstat for the existence of an entry named "agent_intf_java".

 

If the 'load-on-startup' is missing, then the root cause is likely to be DE55158 which is fixed in 17.2 (RU9) and has been forward-ported to 17.3 RU1.

Resolution

Check the 'Fix Lists' in the documentation for 'DE55158' and then apply the relevant rollup patch to the associated product release/version.

 

Work-Around:

 

Add the load-on-startup parameter back into the web.xml file with the value set to 1 .

The web.xml file can be found at the following path in the environment, where $NX_ROOT refers to the base CA Service Desk Manager installation path: 

           $NX_ROOT\bopcfg\www\CATALINA_BASE\webapps\CAisd\WEB-INF


The web.xml should contain the following lines: 

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>pdmweb</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>com.ca.ServicePlus.pdmweb.pdmweb</servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>

Note: Whenever making changes to files, be sure to keep a backup copy; if comments are allowed in the file, best practices would be to ensure any changes are preceded by comments with explanation of change made, initiated by whom, and why the change was made.

Additional Information

For the list of servlets, review the section titled "Server Defaults" under "Tomcat Logging": 

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/content/broadcom/techdocs/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/business-management/ca-service-management/17-2/troubleshooting/troubleshooting-ca-service-desk-manager/tomcat-logging.html