Vendor Certification Priority List is empty in CA Performance Manager (CAPM)

Products

• CA Infrastructure Management
• CA Performance Management - Usage and Administration

Issue/Introduction

When accessing the Vendor Certification (VC) Priority List against a given Metric Family (MF) the list is blank.

Environment

CAPM 3.x

Cause

This problem is seen when importing or editing custom Vendor Certification (VC) entries. If an error is encountered during the import of a new VC, or update of an existing VC, often despite correcting the error and seeing successful import results, when accessing the VC Priority List involved it shows as empty.

Another common cause of this problem is removal or editing of the XML file that is created in the $DA_HOME/apache*/deploy directory.

Resolution

Often this problem is observed as not just the appearance of the blank VC Priority List in the CA Performance Manager (CAPM) , but also sometimes as errors pointing to the problem in the Data Aggregator (DA). Check for this by reviewing the karaf.log in the $DA_HOME/apache*/data/log directory for errors similar to the following:

WARN  | 604519002-450996 | 2014-10-09 12:22:42,281 | WebServiceRestAPIImpl | .rest.impl.WebServiceRestAPIImpl  434 | .ca.im.web-services.impl |
      | Exception caught when performing readJAXBSpecificXML.
com.ca.im.webservices.interfaces.WebServiceException: An internal error has occured.[Null facet descriptor: {http://im.ca.com/certifications/snmp 7D363967177_CISCO_RTTMON_MIB]

This example indicates and attempt to find the custom VC based on the CISCO_RTTMON_MIB, which does not exist in the deploy directory.  In some instances this can be fixed by manually removing the VC referenced in the error from the VC Priority list via the REST service:

             http://<DA_HOSTNAME>:8581/rest/vendorpriorities/

To resolve this, a script called clean_vcp.py is available in the $DA_HOME/scripts directory on the Data Aggregator. When run, the script will first check if there are missing or bad VC entries. If they are found, a second run of the script with a specific flag set will fix the bad entries and resolve the problem.

Using the clean_vcp.py script:

1. Log in as the root user or install owner and cd to the directory the script is in;  $DA_HOME/scripts.
   
   
2. First use the script to DETECT the problem with this command:
   
   ./clean_vcp.py $DA_HOSTNAME
   (Replace $DA_HOSTNAME with the DA host name or IP address)
   
   This will report one of two sets of output. You may see:
              
        Found no broken Vendor Certs in the Vendor Cert Priorities!
   
   Or something like this:
              Found 2 bad vendor certs:
              VCP 520: {http://im.ca.com/certifications/snmp%7DBletch
        VCP 520: {http://im.ca.com/certifications/snmp%7DXyzzy
   
   
3. To FIX the problem if the script reports bad VC entries, run this command:
   
              ./clean_vcp.py $DA_HOSTNAME -fix
   
   This will perform the necessary REST calls to clean up the bad VC entries.
   After this step is completed, run the script again without the -fix flag to verify that it no longer detects any bad VC entries.
   
   

Check the VC Priority List that was affected and verify the list appears as expected again.

If after the fix is implemented and the VC Priority List is visible once more, yet the custom VC being imported is missing, it may require a re-import of the VC.

If for any reason this does not fix the reported problem please open a new issue with the CA Support team for further assistance.