Caching nil pointer errors when collection Tanzu.TAS.ProcessInstance inventory data

Products

• VMware Tanzu Platform - Hub

Issue/Introduction

Users may observe the hub-tas-agent process crashing or logging a panic stack trace during data collection.

The logs will contain a panic similar to the following stack trace:

time=2026-02-28T04:49:16.408151402Z caller=workerpool.go:273 level=error message="panic while executing work" error="runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference" stack="goroutine 98 [running]:runtime/debug.Stack()	/var/vcap/data/packages/golang-1.24-linux/.../runtime/debug/stack.go:26 +0x5egithub.gwd.broadcom.net/TNZ/go-services-sdk/workerpool.executeWork.func1()	/var/vcap/data/compile/hub-tas-agent/vendor/.../workerpool.go:273 +0x58panic(...)	.../runtime/panic.go:792 +0x132cmd/pkg/external-api/capi.(*CAPIClient).GetProcess(...)	/var/vcap/data/compile/hub-tas-agent/pkg/external-api/capi/capi.go:159 +0x4ecmd/pkg/external-api/bbs.(*ActualLRPClient).addAdditionalProcessInfo(...)	/var/vcap/data/compile/hub-tas-agent/pkg/external-api/bbs/bbs.go:155 +0x42cmd/pkg/external-api/bbs.(*ActualLRPClient).GetProcessInstanceFor(...)	/var/vcap/data/compile/hub-tas-agent/pkg/external-api/bbs/bbs.go:98 +0x632cmd/pkg/tas/process.(*collector).HandleInventoryEvent(...)	/var/vcap/data/compile/hub-tas-agent/pkg/tas/process/collector.go:68 +0x2a3...

Environment

Tanzu Hub 10.3.3

Cause

This occurs do to a bug in the caching layer that is storing a nil in the cache after the previous call to get the ProcessInstance returns an error. This issue is often triggered by environmental drift (where a process exists in BBS but has been purged from CAPI) or CAPI overload causing intermittent request failures.

Resolution

This will be fixed in a future release of Tanzu Hub.