I was told by support that there is a completely different problem that has similar symptoms wherein the inventory service itself is affected. I wasn't given a KB for that but maybe log analysis will show if that service had an issue? In this case, the permissions error looked like:
2015-10-20T18:37:57.859Z [tomcat-exec-80 WARN com.vmware.cis.authorization.impl.AclPrivilegeValidator opId=<GUID>] User DOMAIN\username does not have privileges [System.View] on object urn%3Aacl%3Aglobal%3Apermissions
That was from the catalina (tomcat) log IIRC