SCSM Portal error, due to Web Content Server being out of sync

Recently one of my customers had issues with their SCSM Portal where new categories didn't appear and several of the Request offerings failed.

 

Looking in the SMPortalTrace.log it stated that a Management pack was missing from system:

Ressourcestrings for troubleshooting is not available. Keys and arguments often contains enough information to start the troubleshooting a problem. See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=106663&Version=5.0.10411.00&File=mscorlib.dll&Key=Arg_TargetInvocationException ---> Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Presentation.DataAccess.DataAccessConverterException: Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Presentation.DataAccess.DataAccessConverterException: An error occurred during a results conversion using type: Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.ServiceManager.Portal.DataProviders.RequestOfferingOutputConverter ---> Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Common.InconsistentDataException: The requested objects had an unknown management pack. ---> Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Common.InconsistentDataException: The call produced inconsistent results. The data on the client does not match the data returned from the server. The most likely cause is that client-side cache is out of sync with server data. ---> Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Common.ObjectNotFoundException: An object of class ManagementPack with ID 40b87bdd-608a-8858-9ada-e6de1ee8ed9f was not found.

See this blog post on where to the find the SMPortalTrace.log

Looking in the SCSM database the management pack missing is actually the MP containing the offering and is therefore not missing. Do this to check if the MP is in the database: SELECT * FROM ManagementPack WHERE ManagementPackID = ‘40b87bdd-608a-8858-9ada-e6de1ee8ed9f’

But looking at the line just above, there is a message about client-side cache being out of sync:

Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.Common.InconsistentDataException: The call produced inconsistent results. The data on the client does not match the data returned from the server. The most likely cause is that client-side cache is out of sync with server data.

Since my customer is using a corporate SharePoint farm, the Web Content Server (WCS) is on a dedicated server. I therefore uninstalled the WCS and installed it again. After that the portal worked..

If you have this problem, maybe a simple restart of the application pools is enough, otherwise reinstall is the way to go.

 

Thanks to Ruth Lilly from Microsoft Support for helping with the troubleshooting.