Troubleshooting the Data Warehouse: Management packs are stuck in “pending association”

This is the latest in “Troubleshooting the Data Warehouse” series. The goal of this series is to not only help you troubleshoot specific issues you may be experiencing but also teach you more about the data warehouse. For a complete list of posts in the series, check out Troubleshooting the Data Warehouse: An overview.

The symptom

After registering Service Manager to the Data Warehouse and several (4+) hours have passed some management packs are still stuck in “pending association” state. You can check this by opening the Console, clicking Data Warehouse > Data Warehouse Jobs > MPSync Job, and then click Details from the Tasks Pane

The troubleshooting steps

To troubleshoot this issue, investigate the following things in order.

1. Review each batch ID for the “stuck” MP via the MPSyncJob dialog box

In the MP Sync Job dialog, click on the Management Pack column name to sort the list according to Management Pack name. Find those management packs with Pending Association status, check if in the later batch, the Pending Association management pack turns to Associated.

For example in the following figure I’ve highlighted:

· In batch 136, Management Pack Microsoft.SystemCenter.ConfigurationManager is in Pending Association

· In batch 207, Management Pack Microsoft.SystemCenter.ConfigurationManager is in Associated

This means the management pack is associated properly in batch 207 even though it ran into an error in batch 136. Because it recovered in batch 207, the management pack is correctly associated and the sync completed successfully. So even if a management packs is Pending Association in one batch, if in a later batch it is successfully Associated, then the management pack is correctly and completely deployed and synchronized.

If in the MP Sync Job dialog, the Pending Association status for a management pack repeats for every batch, you’ll need to dig a bit deeper to figure out what causes this management pack to fail to associate.

2. Look for deployment failures in management packs which this management pack depends on

Click on the Data Warehouse > Management Packs and then click the Deployment Status column header in the main pane. If you see any management pack whose deployment status is Failed and some are Not Started this is usually due to a management pack dependency. Because management packs can depend on others, any failure can have a domino effect and cause other management packs not able to deploy. Any impacted management pack will have a status of Not Started (it’s not Failed, but because another did Fail it hasn’t yet started).

3. Find the deployment failures in the event log

 Go to the Data Warehouse Management Server, open the Operations Manager Event log, filter the event log to the events whose Event Source is Deployment and Event Level is Warning or Error.

If there is error message similar to the below highlighted text you’ll need to unregister the Data Warehouse from Service Manager, reinstall the Data Warehouse and then re-register Service Manager to Data warehouse.

        Deployment Execution Infrastructure has retried the maximum number of times and is giving up on this execution step.

       MP Element ID: DerivedManagementPack.SystemDerivedMp.ServiceManager.ActivityManagement.Library.Datawarehouse

   MP name: ServiceManager.ActivityManagement.Library.Datawarehouse

       MP version: 7.0.5826.0

       Operation: Install

                Error message: Cannot find resource with ID TransformActivityStatusResource,