vCenter Timeouts Issue

I encountered an issue with the vCenter web client one Monday morning that had never happened before. It seemed to be at random when clicking different tabs and object levels within the infrastructure I was struck with the spinning donut of death and the pages would only partially load. I was getting some information right away such as the vm name and the initial information up on the top, but the details on VM Hardware, etc wasn't working at all. I waited it out and got the following error that popped up in the lower right hand corner of the browser as shown in the example below

Once this error faded out I was able to see the data I needed, but once I clicked on another tab the same thing would happen. You can imagine how annoying this became waiting 2 minutes to navigate around and get the tasks done that I needed. I did the usual steps of clearing cache on the browser, trying a different browser, restarting services on the vCenter appliance. That didn't have any effect. I then rebooted the vCenter appliance again to no effect. I tried logging in from a different computer and still nothing. I next tried to google the error and found a lot of similar errors but none were the same issue I was seeing. I decided to open up a case with VMware.

One of the first things the rep said to me was this sounds like an error from VROPS, he wasn't the case owner but he forwarded my notes to that person and told me to upload the logs. I did so and continued to think about what he had said after our call was over. I did have VROPS appliance trial installed, so I decided to check on it.  I opened a browser and pointed to it and got no response at all. I then decided to try getting into the vROPS management console using the vmware remote console and it wasn't responding at all. I then looked at trying to do a soft guest shutdown and it wouldn't budge. I did a hard power off and then powered back on and then the web portal came back up and I could get in, I was greeted by a key request, I requested a new trial key and got back into the portal. 

Then the magic happened! I was able to navigate around the web client in each and every tab without any delays or timeouts coming up. After a few weeks of struggling with this issue it was amazing to be able to navigate around and not deal with that frustration. I received a callback from vmware support a few days after uploading the logs and was able to tell them I had figured it out on my own and they could close the case.

Thinking back on the issue now it makes perfect sense as vROPs integrates and registers with vCenter and displays additional indicators in the web client under those screens to give you the health badges on infrastructure objects, it was waiting for vROPS to load those items through the DSExporter backend data-provider and when it couldn't get any response timed out after 120 seconds and then gave me the data I needed that came straight from vCenter. Its another one of those issues that can make no sense at the time but looking back really comes together. I wanted to share this issue/experience to save someone else the frustration and perhaps give a few more google results on this particular error message. Thanks for reading!