from https://lists.opendaylight.org/pipermail/infrautils-dev/2018-March/000635.html and related to OPNFLWPLUG-988:

seeing this gives me an idea for an Enhancement, in the infrautils diagstatus code: What I think one would ideally want to see in this output, both on the CLI as well as when used e.g. from a CSIT script via JMX, to avoid having to dig through logs, is WHY something is in Error... so ideally, it should probably be possible to DiagStatusService report() not just a ServiceState in a ServiceDescriptor, but a Throwable to diagstatus, which would set the status to ERROR - and then the CLI/JMX/etc. could include that Throwable as more detailed background about the failure. The code catching exceptions and setting an ERROR ServiceState would then pass that Throwable to the ServiceDescriptor. In this particular case, the NPE that was apparently fixed by c/69657 would then show up there - which would probably help, in the future, to see the real problem more immediately.