Request queued on Catalog when communicating to Process Automation

Products

• CA Service Catalog
• CA Process Automation Base

Issue/Introduction

Service Catalog unable to raise process instances in CA Process Automation, leading them to go to a queued state.  A copy request is also not working, giving a primary key violation error. In addition there is a frequent logout issue on the Load Balancer URL.

Environment

Service Catalog 17.x

Process Automation 4.3/4.4

Resolution

Problem caused by the Load Balancer not using "Sticky" sessions - so we are trying to communicate from Catalog to PAM and vice versa and not hitting the same server we opened the session with. This caused errors of the form

ERROR [pool-3-thread-3] [ITPAMWebserviceManager] Catalog connection to ITPAM failed.
org.apache.axis.AxisFault: ; nested exception is: 
 javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target

and requests not moving forward. The error occurs because the server that the SOAP call goes to is not the one that the login was performed against.