NetOps Spectrum to Portal Sync Failure: Illegal character entity: expansion character (code 0x11)

Products

• Network Observability
• CA Performance Management
• Spectrum

Issue/Introduction

While using NetOps Spectrum and Performance Management Portal integration, you may come across an issue where the Spectrum data source in Portal becomes unable to contact and it fails to sync. If you look in the DMService.log you may run into:

ERROR | pool-3-thread-16         | 2026-08-21 15:47:09,053 | com.ca.im.portal.dm.productsync.DataSourcePoller                 

Data source DS(6) Spectrum Infrastructure Manager@<spectrumServerHostname> encountered an error while processing a sync request. Check the logs for that product to determine the cause of the problem within the data source.  The following stack trace shows the context of the sync request:

jakarta.xml.ws.WebServiceException: [com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxLazyException] com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxParsingException: Illegal character entity: expansion character (code 0x11)
......

......

Caused by: com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxParsingException: Illegal character entity: expansion character (code 0x11)
 at [row,col {unknown-source}]: [1,1101494]

Environment

NetOps Performance Management Portal

NetOps Spectrum

Cause

A bad character exists within a device model in Spectrum database which prevents sync to the Portal database.

Resolution

1. Navigate to the OneClick Administration page (http://<OneClick_Server>/spectrum/admin/index.jsp).
2. Go to Administration Pages -> Debugging -> Web Server Debug.
3. Scroll down the list of modules until you find Performance Center Integration Sync.
4. Set its Debug Level to MAX.
5. Click Apply at the bottom of the page.
6. Trigger the sync from Portal.
7. Once it fails, come back to this page and set it back to Off, then click Apply.
8. Gather the $SPECROOT/tomcat/logs/catalina.out log and find the last item logged before the sync aborts will be the one containing the corrupt 0x11 character.
9. Log into the Spectrum OneClick console.
10. Search for the device by the name listed in the log or by Model Handle listed in the log.
11. Check the Serial Number, Asset Tag, or Notes attributes on that model.
12. Clear out entries and rename them manually. Do not copy and paste or the hidden special character will stick will come right back.
13. Save the changes in Spectrum.
14. Go to the NetOps Portal Data Sources page and click (incremental) Resync for Spectrum.
15. The sync process should move on past the original failure point and hopefully complete.