Administrative Activities report filled with Request Server update events since upgrade to 4.2

Products

• CA Privileged Access Manager (PAM)

Issue/Introduction

Since the upgrade from PAM 4.1.6 to 4.2.0 the Administrative Activities report obtained from the Credentials > Reports > Run page is filled with "Update" events by user "client" of type "Request Server". They appear to be associated with A2A requests.

Environment

Affects PAM releases 4.2.0 and 4.2.1

Cause

In preparation of future PAM A2A client releases, processing of a fourth version substring was added in the 4.2 code base. But existing A2A clients, including the 4.2 version, do not publish such an extended version string yet. This caused an apparent version mismatch in the backend that triggered an A2A client == Request Server update every time an A2A client called into PAM to retrieve a password.

Resolution

This problem is fixed in PAM 4.2.2, see the following item on page Resolved Issues in 4.2.2:

36138299    DE627837    Administrative Activities report filling with excessive Request Server update events.

Additional Information

In most PAM environments this additional activity will not cause any problem for PAM users. In PAM cluster environments with heavy A2A client activity it may have some impact on performance of the current replication leader, which in turn can impact performance of all PAM cluster nodes. If you are on 4.2.0 or 4.2.1, you see these events being generated at a very high rate, and you cannot upgrade to 4.2.2+ yet for some reason, open a case with PAM Support.