Terraform deployment from Aria Automation fails with: "Failed to authenticate. please check your credentials or if the host is reachable"

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• User has a Terraform Integration in Aria Automation Assembler under:
  
  • Infrastructure > Connections > Integrations > Terraform Runtime:
  • 

• When trying to run a Terraform Plan deployment from the Service Broker > Catalog, the deployment fails with the following error:

  • Something went wrong with commit ID ######################################## 400 Bad Request: "{"message": Failed to authenticate. please check your credentials or if the host is reachable", "statusCode":400,"errorCode":#####,"details":"[]}"

Environment

• Aria Automation 8.x
• Terraform Integration implemented for Aria Automation

Cause

• A possible cause for this issue is providing invalid Terraform user credentials.
• Please refer to the Tech Docs which provides the requirements and pre-requisites for configuring the Terraform Runtime Integration:
  • Preparing an Automation Assembler Terraform runtime environment

Resolution

• One potential resolution is to validate the credentials of the Terraform Runtime user supplied to Aria Automation for the Integration to communicate with Terraform.

 

• Another potential resolution is to validate that you are able to reach the server which is hosting the Terraform instance from Aria Automation and vice-versa.
  • Firstly, you can conduct a simple ping test from the Aria Automation and Terraform hosting servers:
    • From Aria Automation Appliance SSH Session:

    • ping terraformserver.example.com

    • From the server hosting the Terraform instance which is integrated into the Aria Automation:

    • ping AriaAutomationFqdn.example.com

 

• • Secondly, we can test the SSL connectivity using Telnet:
    • From Aria Automation Appliance SSH Session:

    • curl -v telnet://terraformserver.example.com:443

      • From the server hosting the Terraform instance which is integrated into the Aria Automation:

    • curl -v telnet://AriaAutomationFqdn.example.com:443