BYOC Edge Node Health Check Failing with 403 Forbidden During ServiceNow Webhook Retry

Voice & Telephony
1

Can’t get this config to load properly…

We are currently migrating our digital channel infrastructure to a Bring Your Own Container (BYOC) setup on AWS EKS to handle high-volume webhook retries for ServiceNow ticket creation. The primary issue is that the Genesys Cloud Edge node consistently reports a UNHEALTHY status in the admin console, specifically failing the internal health check endpoint with a 403 Forbidden response. This occurs immediately after the node registers, preventing any outbound traffic from reaching our ServiceNow instance via the Data Action connector.

The environment details are as follows:

  • Genesys Cloud Release: 2024-06
  • BYOC SDK Version: 2.1.4
  • Kubernetes Cluster: EKS 1.28
  • ServiceNow Integration: REST API v2

The edge container logs show the following stack trace during the handshake phase:
java.security.cert.CertificateException: Certificate chain not trusted. Subject: CN=*.genesys.cloud, O=Genesys.

I have verified that the ca-bundle.crt provided by Genesys is correctly mounted at /etc/ssl/certs/genesys-ca.pem within the container. The truststore.jks file has been updated with the certificate, and the JVM arguments explicitly point to this truststore using -Djavax.net.ssl.trustStore=/opt/genesys/truststore.jks. Despite this, the outbound connection from the edge node to the Genesys Cloud API gateway for validation is being rejected.

It is critical that this health check passes because the ServiceNow webhook retry logic depends on the edge node being in a READY state. If the node remains unhealthy, the Data Action fails silently, and no incident is created in ServiceNow, causing a significant gap in our ticketing workflow.

Has anyone encountered a specific certificate mismatch issue when using the BYOC SDK 2.1.4 in a UK/EU region? The documentation suggests that the default truststore should suffice, but the 403 error implies an authentication or authorization failure rather than a simple SSL handshake timeout. We are currently investigating if there is a specific IAM role assumption issue on the AWS side that is interfering with the mTLS handshake required by the Genesys Edge service.

2

This happens because the Edge node’s health check endpoint requiring specific IP allowlisting that is missing from your AWS security group configuration.

Verify that the Genesys Cloud regional health check IPs are permitted inbound on port 443. The 403 indicates the request reaches the container but is rejected by the ingress controller.

3

My usual workaround is to bypassing the ingress controller for health checks entirely. The suggestion above about IP allowlisting is correct for standard traffic, but during load testing, we often see 403s because the health check requests hit the application layer before the IP whitelist is fully propagated or when the ingress controller is overwhelmed by concurrent webhook retries.

Instead of relying on security groups for the health endpoint, try these adjustments to isolate the health check path:

  • Create a Dedicated Health Check Service: In your Kubernetes manifest, define a separate Service and Ingress rule specifically for /health. This prevents the health check traffic from competing with your ServiceNow webhook retry queue for resources.
  • Adjust Ingress Annotations: Add specific annotations to your ingress resource to skip authentication for the health path. For NGINX ingress, use nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect: "false" and ensure the path match is exact.
  • Verify Token Scopes: The 403 might also stem from the Edge node’s registration token lacking the edge:health:read scope. Check your platform API token configuration. If the token is missing this scope, the Edge node cannot validate its own health status against the Genesys Cloud platform.
  • Test with JMeter: Before redeploying, run a simple JMeter script to hit the /health endpoint directly. Use a thread group with 100 concurrent users to see if the 403 persists under load. If it does, the issue is likely in the ingress controller’s rate limiting settings, not the security group.

Here is a sample ingress snippet for the health endpoint:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
 name: edge-health-ingress
 annotations:
 nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect: "false"
spec:
 rules:
 - http:
 paths:
 - path: /health
 pathType: Exact
 backend:
 service:
 name: edge-health-service
 port:
 number: 8080

This setup usually resolves the 403 issues during high-volume migrations.