Rate Limiting cause response text

[ed_rs]

I am getting 503 status code with my API calls on our Cisco Prime 3.0.  The documentation says that there will be text in the response providing info regarding the cause:

https://developer.cisco.com/media/prime-infrastructure-api-reference-v3-0/192.168.115.187/webacs/api/v1/index6945.html?id=rate-limiting-doc

• NBI Global Rate limit exceeded (More than xxx in yyy ms)
• NBI Rate limit for user <userId> exceeded (More than xxx in yyy ms)
• Per user concurrent query count exceeded Currently xxx : Limit is yyy

In our Java client I am calling the HttpMethod.getResponseBodyAsString()) to pull the text message.  The response message is a html page returned only containing the status code error 503 but does not contain the response text above.   Below is a part of the data in the response.

<h1 class="pageTitle">Page Error: 503</h1>

       <p>

          There is a problem with the page you are looking for. Verify the URL you entered, or the link from the referring page.

       </p>

            <table>

                <tr>

                    <td><b>Status code:</b></td>

                    <td>503</td>

                </tr>

Is there another method to call to retrieve the response text explaining the 503 error code?

Thanks,

Eddy

[Spencer Zier]

Unfortunately, in 3.0 and 3.1, changes to our UI impacted error handling throughout the system.  We addressed and fixed this problem in 3.2 (CSCva10992).

503 errors, in most cases, are because too many requests come through in a given window of time or because too many requests are being processed concurrently.  503 errors should not be sticky (that is, they shouldn't persist forever).  If you hit a scenario where 100% of responses are 503s, often times it is because the system clock has been rolled back, which messes with our accounting of requests.

To answer your question, on 3.0 and 3.1 we do still capture the exact cause of the 503 response in the xmpNbiFw.log file in the PI log folder (/opt/CSCOlumos/logs).