UI failing to seed models/agents in POC mode (Chart v0.5.55)

[bachasachin0]

Description

The CAIPE UI displays the message "No LLM models available" despite models and agents being explicitly defined in the values.yaml.

While the infrastructure (GKE, Vertex AI) and IAM permissions have been verified to work via direct pod execution, the application logic fails to seed these definitions into the UI or the backend database.

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Environment & Setup

• Platform: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
• Model Provider: Vertex AI (enabled)
• Helm Chart Version: v0.5.55
• Identity: Workload Identity enabled. Kubernetes Service Account (KSA) is bound to a Google Service Account (GSA) with full Vertex AI permissions.

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Verification Performed

To isolate the issue to the application layer, the following tests were conducted:

1. Connectivity Test: Exec-ed into the caipe-ui pod and performed a manual API call to the Vertex AI endpoint.
   • Result: Successful. The model returns a valid response. This confirms that Network Policies, Firewalls, and IAM permissions are correctly configured.
2. Config Generation: Confirmed that app-config.yaml is correctly generated and present inside the pod's filesystem.
3. Database Connectivity: Manually injected MONGODB_URI to point to the internal MongoDB service to ensure the UI has a persistence layer.

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Configuration Details (values.yaml)

The setup uses the caipe-ui.appConfig block for seeding and the config block to bypass SSO for POC purposes:

caipe-ui:
  appConfig:
    models:
      - model_id: "gemini-1.5-flash"
        provider: "gcp-vertexai"
    agents:
      - id: "platform-engineer"
        model_id: "gemini-1.5-flash"
  
  # Configuration to bypass SSO
  config:
    oidc:
      # SSO button only disappears if a non-empty string like "none" is used
      issuerUrl: "none"
      
##What I’ve tried:

Confirmed the app-config.yaml is correctly generated inside the pod.

Manually injected MONGODB_URI to point to the internal service.

Verified that the "Sign in with SSO" button only disappears if I use a non-empty string like "none" for the OIDC URL.

Has anyone encountered this "silent seeding failure" where the UI fails to connect to the local MongoDB subchart for initialization? Is there a specific environment variable or flag I'm missing to ensure the UI seeds the models in a no-SSO setup?