NTP Validation on Aria Operations for Logs Fails with error "Validating NTP servers is sometimes unreliable. You may need to retry."

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

• VMware Aria Operations for Logs (formerly Log Insight) fails to validate NTP server with an error: "<IP> failed. Validating NTP servers is sometimes unreliable. You may need to retry."
• ntpq -p command shows NTP server marked with .LOCL and does not show any * symbol. Offset is also noticed to be very high (>1000ms):
  
• ntptime command returns error "ntp_gettime() returns code 5 (ERROR)":
  
• ntpdate <NTP_IP> command corrects the time briefly however, the time drifts away repeatedly.

Environment

VMware Aria Operations for Logs 8.x

Cause

The NTP server being used is not synchronized to an external, reliable upstream source.

Resolution

Utilize a validated NTP server that is correctly synchronized to a reliable time source for NTP configuration in Aria Operations for Logs.