Randomly occurring Unable to retrieve document from: '[PII is hidden]'

Question

I came along with so many questions and answers but could not understand or find solution as my case is bit different. I am using Azure with openIdconnect for Active directory authentication (ASP.Net framework 4.6.1)

it has been years it was working fine but a day before yesterday this error occurred for only about 1 hour. error was occurring when trying to do AD authentication.

Exception Message: IDX20803: Unable to obtain configuration from: '[PII is hidden]'.
Inner Exception: System.IO.IOException: IDX20804: Unable to retrieve document from: '[PII is hidden]'. ---> System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException: Response status code does not indicate success: 400 (Bad Request).

StackTrace: System.InvalidOperationException: IDX20803: Unable to obtain configuration from: '[PII is hidden]'. ---> System.IO.IOException: IDX20804: Unable to retrieve document from: '[PII is hidden]'. ---> System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException: Response status code does not indicate success: 400 (Bad Request).

during this local authentication and remaining whole application was working fine. After 1 hour this issue was automatically resolved. same happened yesterday. issue occurred for 1 hour and resolved automatically.

Other solution are suggesting to modify IdentityModelEventSource.ShowPII = true; But I dont think so it requires code modification.
Please guide what can be reason that this happens for only short time.
Note: this is happening on only one server all applications on other servers are working fine

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Hello @Waqas Zaheer , usually this is being caused by a malformed Open IDC metadata document URL. IdentityModelEventSource.ShowPII is pretty useful for that purpose. Alternatively, you can Collect a network trace with Fiddler and find the mal formed call.

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