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 SquaredUp DS 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 SquaredUp DS v4.4 and above.

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

On SquaredUp DS 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 SquaredUp DS 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)

Topology Perspective

When browsing to the Topology perspective of a distributed application in SquaredUp DS, 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).