Config Sync known issues

This page lists known issues for supported versions of Config Sync.

Many of the issues listed here have been fixed. The Fixed version column indicates the version in which the fix was introduced. To receive this fix, upgrade to the listed version or later.

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Category Identified version Fixed version Issue and workaround
Component health 1.15.0

Reconciler unschedulable

Config Sync reconcilers require varying amounts of resources, depending on the configuration of the RootSync or RepoSync. Certain configurations require more resources than others.

If a reconciler is unschedulable, it might be due to requesting more resources than are available on your nodes.

If you're using standard mode GKE clusters, the reconciler resource requests are set very low. This setting was chosen in an attempt to allow scheduling, even if it would lead to throttling and slow performance, so that Config Sync works on small clusters and small nodes. However, on GKE Autopilotclusters, the reconciler requests are set higher, to more realistically represent usage while syncing.

Workaround:

GKE Autopilot or GKE Standard with node auto-provisioning enabled should be able to see how many resources are requested and create appropriately sized nodes to allow scheduling. However, if you're manually configuring the nodes or node instance sizes, you might need to adjust those settings to accommodate the reconciler Pod resource requirements.
Metrics 1.15.0 1.17.2

Fixed: Exporting failed: Unrecognized metric labels

In version 1.15.0, Config Sync added type and commit labels to many metrics. These labels increased metric cardinality, which increased the number of metrics being exported. Attribute processing was also added to filter these labels when exporting to Cloud Monarch, but this filtering was misconfigured, causing transformation errors in the otel-collector logs.
Metrics 1.15.0

Exporting failed. Permission denied

By default, when the reconciler-manager detects Application Default Credentials, the otel-collector is configured to export metrics to Prometheus, Cloud Monitoring, and Monarch.

Workaround:

otel-collector logs errors if you haven't Configured Cloud Monitoring or Disabled Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Monarch.
Metrics 1.15.0

otel-collector crashing with custom config

If you try to modify or delete one of the default ConfigMaps, otel-collector or otel-collector-google-cloud, the otel-collector might error or crash from not being able to load the required ConfigMap.

Workaround:

To customize the metrics export configuration, create a ConfigMap named otel-collector-custom in the config-management-monitoring namespace.
nomos cli 1.15.0 1.17.2

Fixed: nomos status and nomos bugreport don't work in a Pod

Before nomos version 1.17.2, nomos bugreport and nomos status could only connect to the local cluster when run inside a Kubernetes Pod. In nomos version 1.17.2, the authorization method was changed to work more like kubectl. Because of this change, the local cluster is targeted by default. You can override the config by specifying the KUBECONFIG environment variable.
Remediation

Config Sync fighting with itself

Config Sync might appear to be in a controller fight. with itself. This issue occurs if you set the default value for an optional field of a resource in the Git repository. For example, setting apiGroup: "" for the subject of a RoleBinding triggers this because the apiGroup field is optional and an empty string is the default value. The default values of string, boolean, and integer fields are "", false, and 0 (respectively).

Workaround:

Remove the field from the resource declaration.
Remediation

Config Sync fighting with Config Connector resources

Config Sync might appear to be fighting Config Connector over a resource, for example a StorageBucket. This issue occurs if you don't set the value of an optional field of a resource spec.lifecycleRule.condition.withState in the source of truth.

Workaround:

You can avoid this issue by adding the withState=ANY field on the resource declaration. Alternatively, you can abandon and then reacquire the resource with the cnrm.cloud.google.com/state-into-spec: absent annotation.

Source of truth 1.17.3 1.18.3

Fixed: Git SSH Authentication Failure with GitHub

git-sync v4.2.1 has a bug that removes the username from the repository URL when using SSH, causing authentication to fail when connecting to GitHub, which requires the user to be git.

The error message from git is: git-sync@github.com: Permission denied (publickey).\r\nfatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Workaround:

Use a different authentication method.
Source of truth 1.15.0 1.18.0

Fixed: Periodically invalid authentication credentials for Cloud Source Repositories

Config Sync can error periodically when the authentication token expires for Cloud Source Repositories. This issue is caused by the token refresh waiting until expiration before refreshing the token.

In version 1.18.0 and later, the token is refreshed on the first request within five minutes of token expiration. This prevents the invalid authentication credentials error unless the credentials are actually invalid.
Source of truth 1.15.0 1.17.0

Fixed: Error syncing repository: context deadline exceeded

In versions earlier than 1.17.0, Config Sync checked out the full Git repository history by default. This could lead to the fetch request timing out on large repositories with many commits.

In version 1.17.0 and later, the Git fetch is performed with --depth=1, which only fetches the latest commit. This speeds up source fetching, avoids most timeouts, and reduces the Git server load.

If you're still experiencing this issue after upgrading, it's likely that your Source of truth has many files, your Git server is responding slowly, or there is some other networking problem.
Source of truth 1.13.0

Unable to generate access token for OCI source

When Config Sync is configured to use OCI as the source of truth and authenticate with Workload Identity Federation for GKE, Config Sync might occasionally encounter temporary errors when it attempts to authenticate with the container registry, due to an issue refreshing the ID token.

This issue is caused by the oauth2 library only refreshing the auth token after the token has already expired.

The error message might include: "oauth2/google: unable to generate access token" or "ID Token issued at (xxx) is stale to sign-in."

Workaround:

The error should resolve itself the next time Config Sync attempts to fetch from the source of truth.

When Config Sync has errored multiple times, it will retry increasingly less frequently. If you want to force it to retry sooner, you can delete the reconciler pod, which causes it to be recreated and immediately fetch from the source of truth.
Syncing 1.15.0

High number of ineffective PATCH requests in the audit logs

The Config Sync remediator uses Dry-run to detect drift. This can cause PATCH requests to show up in the audit log, even when the PATCH isn't persisted, because the audit log doesn't distinguish between dry-runs and normal requests.

Workaround:

Because the audit log cannot distinguish between dry-run and non-dry-run requests, you can ignore the PATCH requests.
Syncing 1.17.0 1.17.3

Fixed: Config Sync fails to pull the latest commit from a branch

In Config Sync versions 1.17.0, 1.17.1, and 1.17.2, you might encounter a problem where Config Sync fails to pull the latest commit from the HEAD of a specific branch when the same branch is referenced in multiple remotes and they are out of sync. For example, the main branch of a remote repository origin might be ahead of the same branch in the remote repository upstream, but Config Sync only fetches the commit SHA from the last line, which might not be the latest commit.

The following example shows what this issue might look like:

git ls-remote -q [GIT_REPOSITORY_URL] main  main^{}
244999b795d4a7890f237ef3c8035d68ad56515d    refs/heads/main               # the latest commit
be2c0aec052e300028d9c6d919787624290505b6    refs/remotes/upstream/main    # the commit Config Sync pulls from

In version 1.17.3 and later, the git-sync dependency was updated with a different fetch mechanism.

If you can't upgrade, you can set your Git revision (spec.git.revision) to the latest commit SHA regardless of the value set for the Git branch (spec.git.branch). For more information about the Git configs, see Configuration for the Git repository.
Private registry 1.19.0

Config Sync doesn't use private registry for reconciler Deployments

Config Sync should replace the images for all Deployments when a private registry is configured. However, Config Sync does not replace the image registry for images in the reconciler Deployments.

Workaround:

A workaround for this issue is to configure the image registry mirror in containerd.

Syncing 1.17.0 1.18.3

Fixed: Config Sync reconciler is crashlooping

In Config Sync versions 1.17.0 or later, you might encounter a problem where the reconciler fails to create a rest config in some Kubernetes providers.

The following example shows what this issue might look like in the reconciler logs:

Error creating rest config: failed to build rest config: reading local kubeconfig: loading REST config from "/.kube/config": stat /.kube/config: no such file or directory
Terraform Terraform version 5.41.0

Config Sync can't be installed or upgraded using Terraform

Terraform version 5.41.0 introduced a new field to the google_gke_hub_feature_membership: config_sync.enabled. Because the default value of this field is false, it causes Config Sync installations to fail when Terraform is upgraded to version 5.41.0.

Workaround:

  • If you use the google_gke_hub_feature_membership resource, manually set the config_sync.enabled to true.
  • If you use the acm submodule, it's recommended to switch to an alternative way to install Config Sync. If you're unable to switch, upgrade to v33.0.0.

Google Cloud console

Config Sync dashboard missing data errors in the Google Cloud console

You might see errors such as "missing data" or "invalid cluster credentials" for Config Sync clusters on dashboards in the Google Cloud console. This issue can occur when you're not logged in to your GDC (VMware) or GDC (bare metal) clusters.

Workaround:

If you see these types of errors in the Google Cloud console on your GDC (VMware) or GDC (bare metal) clusters, ensure that you're logged in to your clusters with GKE Identity Service or connect gateway.

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