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System Health & the COG Database Account

Overview — When NSCAT Cannot Reach Its Database

NSCAT's API exposes a health endpoint that checks whether the application can reach its database. Where it cannot, the response now names the most likely cause explicitly rather than returning a generic failure:

Unable to connect to the database. If this persists, the COG Database Owner Account password may have expired. Please contact COG IT.

This message exists because an expired database owner account password produces symptoms that look nothing like a credentials problem to the people reporting them.

What This Is — and What It Is Not

   

This is

The password on the COG database owner account — the service account NSCAT's API uses to connect to SQL Server. It is managed by COG IT, on COG's password policy, entirely outside NSCAT.

This is not

Any NSCAT user's password. NSCAT user passwords do not expire, are not rotated, and have no maximum age.

 

HEADS UP  Do not respond to this message by resetting anyone's NSCAT account password. It will not help, and it wastes the window in which the real problem could be fixed. The account in question is not visible in Manage User.

What Users Will Report

When the database account password has expired, NSCAT does not present a tidy error. Expect reports like:

·        Spinners that never resolve on pages that normally load instantly.

·        "Everything worked this morning and now nothing loads."

·        Sign-in failing for everyone, with correct credentials.

·        Saves failing across unrelated pages at the same time.

·        Autosave chips showing Save failed on every content page at once.

PRO TIP  The tell is breadth. A permission or validation problem affects one person or one page. A database connectivity problem affects everyone, everywhere, starting at a single moment in time. If three unrelated reports arrive within a few minutes of each other, check health before investigating any of them individually.

What To Do

1.      Confirm the breadth. Ask a second person on a different account and a different page. If it works for them, this is not it.

2.      Check the health endpoint. Your COG IT contact or whoever deployed the API can query it; the message above is what it returns.

3.      Contact COG IT, quoting the message verbatim. The fix is theirs — rotating the database owner account password and updating the API's connection configuration.

4.      Tell your users to stop retrying and to leave their browser tabs open. Autosave queues changes when the failure looks like a network problem and drains the queue automatically when connectivity returns. Closing the tab discards the queue and any local draft with it.

HEADS UP  Point 4 matters more than it looks. An analyst who closes a browser tab in frustration loses whatever autosave had queued. One that stays open may recover it. Say so when you acknowledge the outage.

 

GOOD TO KNOW  Autosave's offline queue makes up to five attempts to drain once connectivity returns, one second apart, then gives up and shows Save failed. So a short outage often resolves itself with nothing lost; a long one does not.

Preventing It

PRO TIP  This is a scheduled, predictable event. Ask COG IT for the database owner account's expiry date and put a reminder in your own calendar two weeks ahead. The one thing worse than the outage is discovering the account expired on the morning your assessment team was writing up thirty interviews.

 

GOOD TO KNOW  There is nothing to configure inside NSCAT for this. The health message is informational; the remedy is entirely on the infrastructure side.

Common Problems

What you see

What it means

The database connection message on the health endpoint

The API cannot reach SQL Server. Likely an expired database owner account password. Contact COG IT.

Everyone signed out at once

Same cause — or the API is down. Check health before anything else.

Save failed on every page for every user

Not a permission problem. Check health.

An administrator asks you to reset the "expired password"

Clarify which account. NSCAT user passwords do not expire.

Health is fine but one user cannot sign in

Their account is disabled, or their credentials are wrong. Nothing to do with this page.

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