Project Creating Report Center Web failed

I'm not sure how many of you have run into this delightful error when standing up a PWA site but I have run into this a handful of times myself in the last year.

The issue presents upon initial provisioning of a PWA site in the Project Server Service Application. You create your site like you may have on many other deployments and initiate the provisioning process. It processes and processes and looks like all is well only to end up with a "Failed".

In my instance of this issue ran through troubleshooting with my customer trying to figure out what was wrong. We hit all the major checks going through things step by step; ULS logs, Event log, etc. No matter what we tried and settings we enabled the failure was still the same everytime getting hit with this error; "Project_Creating_Report_Center_Web_Failed: .

This particular customer had a fairly hardened environment so my thoughts were initially around that being a potential cause as it is a fairly regular thing I have run into, so as this was a test environment and I had no clear picture on what had been done prior I suggested an uninstall and reinstall and deleting the databases associated with that farm. Rebuilt everything thinking it had to be with that config as we had been encountering several other just odd issues in our troubleshooting of this.

After reloading everything in fairly short order we attempted to provision again and same thing as before "Project_Creating_Report_Center_Web_Failed". This was beginning to be rather perplexing as we had just uninstalled and reinstalled everything both SharePoint and Project Server. At this point I figured, well the provisioning failed but it was on the Report center portion so maybe the site itself had provisioned most of the way. I attempted to navigate to our intended PWA site just to see what kind of error we may encounter hoping that it had at least partially completed and had a semblance of an expected site. Immediately once the page loaded I finally got a good clue as to what was going on. The site that loaded was not the good old green tiles for project server but a giant mess of broken icons and the semblance of custom branding that my customer identified as having been deployed in a SharePoint test on this server. Mind you this machine had the bits uninstalled and reinstalled several times over the last couple months as it was a testing environment.

The customer at this point recognized the way that this site looked aside from the broken images as a template customization that they had deployed in an earlier test iteration of this box. He then got in contact with their SharePoint dev and located the customizations in the SharePoint GAC (multiple uninstalls had left the items in there intact) and removed them.

Once gone we attempted our provisioning once more and we were finally greeted with a successful provision.

Lesson Learned: Don't assume an uninstall cleans up all files or configurations or customizations and know your servers past usage.