Vault operational logs may occasionally display entries that resemble the following examples:
[INFO] http2: received GOAWAY [FrameHeader GOAWAY len=20], starting graceful shutdown
[INFO] http2: server sent GOAWAY and closed the connection
These outputs are from the Go language net http2 package. A GoAwayError is returned when the server closes the TCP connection after sending a GOAWAY frame. These messages are typically harmless and expected as part of a HTTP/2 connection life cycle. They may appear across all vault releases including Vault 1.20 and go1.24.4 (at the time of writing) as well as earlier versions.
If these messages regularly repeat inline or near to other failures then it may require further investigation into how client as well as server side connectivity are occurring to each other and potential causes on each level with the various network appliances that may be involved.
Other scenarios and consideration that may relate to these messages in the event of it repeating or being reproducible can include:
Network constraints like enforced rate limits by other network appliances (Load-Balancers, etc)
Fatal or erroneous requests resulting in the expected termination of sessions
There are also periods where these may be excessively reported without any observable failure or other error conditions and in which case they may also be ignored. A GitHub issue (net/http: should stop logging received GOAWAY) is raised by to reduce how often and when these message ought to be emitted.
Useful References: