VNA Viptela Plugin not showing data for "Last Hour" time frame reports

Products

• CA Virtual Network Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Viptela Plugin integration.
Reports with "Last Hour" time frame always shows no data.  While for "Last 4 Hours" time frame there are data.

According to the VNA documentation, the VNA Viptela plugin time zone value must correlate to the time zone of the vManage.

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-enterprise-software/it-operations-management/dx-netops/20-2/Modern-Network-Monitoring-with-DX-Virtual-Network-Assurance/building/viptela.html

TIMEZONE
The time zone of the system, which must match the vManage time zone.

Set this parameter correctly to prevent the following issues:
Incorrect timestamps might appear on performance data.
Performance data might be missing.
Alarms and events might not be collected.

If for example the vManage host has timezone set to GMT+3, we may set VNA Viptela Plugin config to GMT+3.

However this does not help for the Last Hour reports - it seems this time zone format is not accepted.  

 

Environment

Release : 20.2.x

 

Cause

The time zone format like GMT+3 is being rejected by the current Viptela Plugin logic.

Check the oc.log for these messages:

2021-02-16 10:50:00,719 ERROR (EE-ManagedThreadFactory-default-Thread-6285) Viptela_440b9f83-b2e5-427a-b7af-7c8f1387b753=Performance Poll [OC_SCRIPTING] Logger$error$6 -1  Illegal time zone specified: GMT+3

 

The problem is in how the Viptela Plugin java API is consuming the time zone entry.

As per this document:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/TimeZone.html#getTimeZone(java.lang.String)

For example, TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT-8").getID() returns "GMT-08:00".

The input GMT+3 is an abbreviation that is compared against the "id" and does not match with standard GMT-08:00

So, using an official format like GMT+03:00 instead of an alias or abbreviation will work.

Resolution

In the Viptela plugin config, for the ""TIMEZONE": "xxx"," setting, use the official format - e.g. "GMT+03:00", instead of any alias (like GMT+3) or time zone full name.

For example:

"PROTOCOL": "https",
    "SLA_CLASS_DELTA_TIME": "86400",
    "SLA_CLASS_POLL_RATE": "0 0 0",
    "TIMEZONE": "GMT+03:00",
    "TUNNEL_PERFORMANCE_SAMPLE_INTERVAL": "300",
    "USE_PROXY": "FALSE",
    "VEDGE_PERFORMANCE_SAMPLE_INTERVAL": "300",
    "VMANAGE_IP": "xx.xx.xx.xxx",
    "VMANAGE_PASSWORD": "****",
    "VMANAGE_PORT": "443",
    "VMANAGE_PROXY_IP": "0.0.0.0",
    "VMANAGE_PROXY_PASSWORD": "****",
    "VMANAGE_PROXY_PORT": "0",
    "VMANAGE_PROXY_PROTOCOL": "https",
    "VMANAGE_PROXY_USER_NAME": "",
    "VMANAGE_USER_NAME": "your_user"
  }
}

Additional Information

This is currently being reviewed to enhance the Viptela plugin logic to accept all valid java time zone values including alias.