SDDC Manager UI displays "Failed to fetch NSX information." due to LCM service authentication failure

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager / VCF Installer

Issue/Introduction

In VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2.x, you encounter the following symptoms:

• SDDC Manager UI is unable to retrieve NSX Manager or cluster information.
• API calls to /v1/nsxt-clusters or image management fail with the error:
  "message": "Failed to fetch the images from LCM Service with error: Bad Gateway."
• The lcm service status is Down or repeatedly in an Activating state.
• In /var/log/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm.log, you see HikariPool initialization exceptions:
  org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: FATAL: password authentication failed for user "lcm"
• In /var/log/vmware/vcf/commonsvcs/vcf-commonsvcs.log, you see:
  Error while trying to retrieve service http://127.0.0.1/lcm/about status, 502 Bad Gateway
• PostgreSQL logs (/var/log/postgres/postgresql-xxxx.log) confirm the failure:
  FATAL: password authentication failed for user "lcm"
DETAIL: Connection matched pg_hba.conf line 91: "host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5"

Environment

VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2.x

Cause

The lcm service or the underlying PostgreSQL lcm-db may have encountered a transient hang, a stale process, or a database connection pool exhaustion.

Resolution

Workaround:

1. SSH session to the SDDC Manager VM and switch to the root user
   
   
2. restart the database and the LCM service:
   systemctl restart lcm-db
systemctl restart lcm
3. Verify the service health: Wait 1-2 minutes for the service to initialize, then run:
   curl -v http://127.0.0.1/lcm/about
4. If it returns a 200 OK response with version information, the service is restored.
5. Go back to SDDC Manager UI to check if the issue is resolved.