vRealize Business Cost Calculation failures due to multiple entities in vRealize Automation with the same name

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• In the vRealize Business for Cloud UI the status of Cost Calculation will show as healthy. However, the timestamp of the last completed Cost Calculation will not be within 1-2 days.
• In the facts-repo.log on the vRealize Business for Cloud appliance errors will be seen similar to:

2018-07-06 02:16:34.171 ERROR [qtp556488341-19] c.v.v.f.i.ChangesInputController - Failure responding to request: /input/changes/system

com.xxxxx.vrb.facts.SerializationException: Failed serializing entry: Change(<vRealize Automation Entity>)...

Caused by: java.lang.ClassCastException: com.xxxxxx.vrb.facts.input.Change cannot be cast to scala.collection.Traversable

 at com.twitter.chill.TraversableSerializer.write(Traversable.scala:21) ~[chill_2.11-0.7.2.jar:0.7.2]

 at com.esotericsoftware.kryo.Kryo.writeObject(Kryo.java:534) ~[kryo-3.0.3.jar:?]

 at com.xxxxx.vrb.facts.input.JournalEntrySerialization$class.serializeEntry(JournalEntrySerialization.scala:27) ~[facts-repo.jar:?]

 ... 118 more

Caused by: rx.exceptions.OnErrorThrowable$OnNextValue: OnError while emitting onNext value: com.xxxxxxx.vrb.facts.input.Change.class

 at rx.exceptions.OnErrorThrowable.addValueAsLastCause(OnErrorThrowable.java:109) ~[rxjava-1.0.17.jar:1.0.17]

 at rx.exceptions.Exceptions.throwOrReport(Exceptions.java:188) ~[rxjava-1.0.17.jar:1.0.17]

 at rx.xxxxxx.operators.OperatorMap$1.onNext(OperatorMap.java:56) ~[rxjava-1.0.17.jar:1.0.17]

 ... 108 more

Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

Environment

VMware vRealize Business for Cloud Standard 7.x
VMware vRealize Business for Cloud Advanced 7.x

Cause

This is due to multiple entities in vRealize Automation having the same name. For example, if both a tenant and a blueprint have the same exact name this will cause the vRealize Business cost calculation to fail.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting VMware vRealize Business for Cloud Standard 7.4 .

Workaround:
The workaround is the following:

1. Delete one, or both, of the entities in vRealize Automation.
2. Unregister vRealize Business from vRealize Automation in the vRealize Business VAMI (https://<vRealize Business FQDN or IP>:5480).
3. Take a snapshot of the vRealize Business appliance in vCenter.
4. Delete the following folders on the appliance if it is vRealize Business 7.4: 

/usr/local/tomcat/leveldb/VC_STATS_MARKERS
/usr/local/tomcat/leveldb/DATASOURCE_CONFIG_VRA/
/usr/local/tomcat/leveldb/VRA_START_TIME_MARKERS/
/usr/local/tomcat/itbm-data-collector/webapps/itfm-cloud-vra-dc/*
/journal

5. Re-register vRealize Business to vRealize Automation.
6. Verify that a data collection and cost calculation completes.