What causes "GetCellInfo(%s) failed: %w" in vitessio/vitess?

Inspect the wrapped cause and the named cell's topology record

GetCellInfo( ) failed

Error message

GetCellInfo(%s) failed: %w

What it means

The per-cell GetCellInfo vtctld RPC failed for one cell while others may succeed. The error is recorded with the cell name. Typical causes are vtctld-side failures reading that cell's topology record or the cell's topology backend being down.

Solutions

Inspect the wrapped cause and the named cell's topology record
Verify the cell's topology backend (etcd/zk) is healthy
Remove or fix stale cell records
Retry; if persistent, investigate vtctld logs for that cell

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Validate before calling

// check the cell record exists before fetching details
names, err := vtctldClient.GetCellInfoNames(ctx, &vtctldatapb.GetCellInfoNamesRequest{})
if err != nil { return err }
for _, n := range names.Names {
    if n == cell { /* ok */ }
}

Try / catch

cells, err := cluster.GetCellInfos(ctx, req)
if err != nil {
    var missing string
    if strings.Contains(err.Error(), "GetCellInfo(") {
        // parse cell name from message; degrade gracefully (partial results) or retry
    }
    return err
}

Prevention

Clean up stale cell records after decommission
Monitor per-region topology backends
Validate cell records after adding a cell
Use partial-failure handling for multi-cell requests

When it happens

Trigger: c.Vtctld.GetCellInfo RPC error for a specific cell — cell record missing/malformed in topology, that cell's etcd/zk unreachable, or vtctld error.

Common situations: A recently added cell with incomplete topology records; regional topology outage; cell decommissioned but still referenced; network partition to one datacenter.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of vitessio/vitess@01a25a7d17 (2026-09-01). Data as JSON: /api/errors/247c4fd6afe71bab. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at go/vt/vtadmin/cluster/cluster.go:1109

		rec concurrency.AllErrorRecorder
	)

	for _, name := range names {
		wg.Add(1)
		go func(name string) {
			defer wg.Done()

			if err := c.topoReadPool.Acquire(ctx); err != nil {
				rec.RecordError(fmt.Errorf("GetCellInfo(%s) failed to acquire topoReadPool: %w", name, err))
				return
			}
			resp, err := c.Vtctld.GetCellInfo(ctx, &vtctldatapb.GetCellInfoRequest{
				Cell: name,
			})
			c.topoReadPool.Release()

			if err != nil {
				rec.RecordError(fmt.Errorf("GetCellInfo(%s) failed: %w", name, err))
				return
			}

			m.Lock()
			defer m.Unlock()
			infos = append(infos, &vtadminpb.ClusterCellInfo{
				Cluster:  cpb,
				Name:     name,
				CellInfo: resp.CellInfo,
			})
		}(name)
	}

	wg.Wait()
	if rec.HasErrors() {
		return nil, rec.Error()
	}

View on GitHub (pinned to 01a25a7d17)