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Troubleshooting Visual Application Discovery and Analysis (VADA)

Documentation Team
  • Updated

Troubleshooting Visual Application Discovery and Analysis (VADA)

Overview

VADA (see Visual Application Discovery & Analysis (VADA)) obtains information to help you discover your application topology by running System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) agent tasks on the machine in your deployment you request. If anything goes wrong, the error details are returned in the VADA user interface to help you diagnose any issue.

This article is to help you with troubleshooting any issues you may experience whilst using VADA.

 

Discover Mode

 

Discovery error

If you see a message Discovery error or Discovery is disabled see Discovery Error (VADA).

 

Add discovery

See 'Add Discovery' or 'Discovery Error' in VADA.

 

Discovery not available

See Discovery Not Available (VADA).

 

Discovery is unable to complete through a Citrix NetScaler using Service Groups

Discovery is unable to complete through a Citrix NetScaler virtual server which has been configured to use Service groups (rather than directly containing services), so the endpoint is added as a child, but no links are discovered. This is because the Citrix NetScaler management pack does not expose the Service Group-Service relationship.

 

SQL servers or databases may not be discovered when used on a failover cluster or Always On Availability group

This is currently a known issue, due to SCOM Windows Computer discovery only occurring once in a 24 hour period, and the SQL listener IP moving from server to server.

 

Component level discovery on SQL 2017 and 2019

On Dashboard Server v4.3 and below, SQL 2017 and 2019 databases and SQL instances cannot be discovered, but can be added manually. These can be discovered on Dashboard Server v4.4 and above.

 

Component level discovery for non-ASP.NET IIS websites and web apps

On Dashboard Server v4.4 and above IIS websites and IIS app pools can be discovered and mapped, and any IIS ASP.Net Endpoints discovered by SCOM are also added to the map. If you are using Dashboard Server v4.3 or below we recommend you upgrade, as you will only be able to discover and map IIS ASP.Net Endpoints.

 

Task permission is required in Systems Center Operations Manager to perform the discovery operation

The user has not been granted permission in SCOM to execute the Get Netstat CSV (Data On Demand) task (for example, they are a Read-Only Operator). A SCOM administrator will need to modify their permissions.

 

Errors discovering Unix or Linux machines

In order to discover correctly on Unix and Linux systems, the Get Netstat CSV task (upon which VADA depends) must be able to execute ps and netstat with root privileges.

If you have not correctly configured privileged access for the SCOM Unix/Linux agent (either misconfiguring the account assigned to the UNIX/Linux Privileged Account profile, or the server's sudoers configuration), you may receive errors such as:

  • sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified
  • StdErr:ERROR: Process ID list syntax error.
  • When viewing the task output (see below) you may see the PID, ProcessName, and ProcessDescription columns empty.

Check with the administrator for that system to ensure that the privileged account bound to the UNIX/Linux Privileged Account run as profile is configured correctly, is distributed to the appropriate resource pool, and that the user account in use has the correct sudoers configuration.

 

Analyze Mode

See Perspective Not Available (VADA)

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Topology Perspective

When browsing to the Topology perspective of a distributed application in Dashboard Server, you may see a message indicating that the distributed application (DA) cannot be displayed:

This Distributed Application cannot be displayed. Only Distributed Applications that contain Component Groups can be displayed

See This Distributed Application cannot be displayed (VADA).

 

Troubleshooting

VADA discovery depends on being able to run the "Get Netstat CSV (Data On Demand)" task on the machine of interest. Trying to run this task separately can sometimes give more useful information to help diagnose what the problem is.

 

Run the Netstat task from Dashboard Server

Navigate to the server object in Dashboard Server which is causing the discovery errors and perform the following four steps:

  1. Click the task button
  2. Select Get Netstat CSV (Data On Demand) task
  3. Click execute
  4. Observe the output below

Run the Netstat task from the SCOM Console

  1. Under the Monitoring tab click on the Windows Computers or Unix/Linux Computers view as appropriate.
  2. Locate the server which is causing discovery issues
  3. In the Tasks pane on the left, locate and click on Get Netstat CSV (Data on Demand)
  4. Click the Run button at the bottom of the window. When the task completes, check the Task output pane for information.

 

Further assistance

Please contact SquaredUp Support if you experience any problems and reply to the automatic response with the output of the Dashboard Server Diagnostics (see Collecting diagnostic information) and, if possible, a screenshot of the problem.