The 502 That Wouldn't Die: Debugging a Broken Apigee Eval Org From the Ground Up

Users of Apigee X evaluation organizations may encounter a persistent 502 Server Error despite the Cloud Console and Management API showing ACTIVE status for organizations and runtime instances. Even with proxies deployed and environment groups bound, requests fail. The root cause is identified as the provisioning wizard creating a proxy-forwarding instance template without an attached service account and leaving a required ENDPOINT metadata key blank. Debugging requires using gcloud and curl to verify backend-services configurations.