Data Collection issue post Aria Operations upgrade due to unsupported/Deprecated Management Pack - "Describe Operations failed"

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

After a successful upgrade of Aria Operations and Cloud Proxies.  Cloud Proxies are showing "Going Online" status.  Adapters are not collecting.

If adapters are changed to Default collectors, data collection is also failing.

If cluster is taken offline, then try to bring it back online, it will stay in "Going Online" state.

Environment

Aria Operations 8.18.x

Cause

Deprecated and unsupported Management Pack can cause Describe Operations to fail, resulting in the Cloud Proxy being in 'Going Online' status.

Examples of identified Management packs that caused the failure in Describe Operations.

• Dell Enterprise Storage Array (ESA) Management Pack.
• Dell EMC Converged Systems Management Pack.
• SNMP Management Pack

The following sample error was taken from the Aria Operations collector.log file:

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS INFORMATION [Heartbeat]  com.integrien.alive.collector.HeartbeatThread.hbFailLogger - vRealize Ops controller did not successfully respond to collector id request. Response code = -8 Message = Controller is not ready. Check adapters describe status.
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS INFO  [Heartbeat]  com.integrien.alive.collector.HeartbeatThread.doHeartBeat -  <- HB response : Controller is not ready. Check adapters describe status.

On Aria Operations UI, Redescribe shows the following error:

When try to perform a "Redescribe" operations, the following error is recorded in analytics-########.log:

Note: The sample Error below depicted the failure due to the Dell EMC Management pack. 

ERROR [DistTaskDistributedTaskDescribe] com.vmware.vcops.controller.data.utils.AdapterDescribeManager.describeAdapters - Describe failed java.lang.RuntimeException: Describe would remove resources, so we are failing to describe. Problematic resource kind is EMC:Disk. Please mark this kind as deleted to remove with the child resource or repair the adapter and try again!

Resolution

1. Delete the problematic Management Pack from the Repository:
1. Log into the Product UI with "admin" credentials
2. Go to Administration/Integrations
3. Click on Repository Tab
4. Locate the specific problematic Management Pack and click Delete.
2. Once the Management Pack is deleted, go to Global Setting/Redescribe.  Click on "Redescribe" to perform another Describe Operations. Upon successful redescribe, all Cloud Proxies will be showing as Online. Data Collection will be working properly.
   
   Note: If for some reason, some adapters are stuck in "stopping" status, manual stop/start process can be done to update the collection status.
   Example: One of the vCenter stuck in "stopping" status.
1. Go to Operations > Inventory Management > Adapter Instance
2. Select the vCenter in question, click "Stop", then click "Start" to reset the collection status.