A technical blog post on changes to improve error messages within Easy SSO products from TechTime
Here at TechTime, we found that our customers were having trouble getting EasySSO set up. But we couldn’t see who it was and why it was. So we’ve made an assumption. (This may come back and bite us later), but for now, we think it’s worth taking the chance. We believe that when something goes wrong and its answer is more than a click away, it goes into the ‘too hard’ basket for a couple of months or is never revisited. Which, is fair enough - everyone’s time is precious and we don’t want to waste it. Not everyone loves to read a wall of text or have to download logs, or even know what logs are let alone know to have a dig through them.
Speed bumps in EasySSO
- People were dropping off after trying to set things up - which means that they were running into trouble somewhere
- Companies could take months to set things up - this could be due to the size of the company or priorities
- Depending on knowledge, it could take a while to set up - it’s likely if met with an error, the customer would give up
Because of this, we’ve made troubleshooting a lot easier with our new release of EasySSO. Instead of having one or two lines that don’t give much info about what’s going on behind the scenes, we’ve brainstormed what key errors need to be displayed.
The Customer experience wasn’t amazing.
The two lines don’t give much info about what’s going on behind the scenes. Looking at it, it seems simple - it’s nice and short, yet cryptic. But what does ‘failed to retrieve property: domain.netbios.name’ even mean? Here EasySSO is trying to locate the Domain Controller for the “techtime.org” domain specified at the top of the screenshot and it’s failing. The actual reasons behind this failure could be a range of things, a network timeout, a DNS failure and so on. So we started working on making things better.
Before, if you were having trouble setting up your EasySSO configuration, you would have to get in touch with our 24x7 support, either by email, chat, Service Desk portal or (for the more adventurous), by phone. Then, on the phone, we would ask you to send us a log file and get you to head to EasySSO-logs. Once there, you would have to look for the Jespa error log, which would be a huge wall of text, and you’d have to sieve through to try and find the words that you think might mean something. From here you’d send back that info to us (if you didn’t get lost along the way) and then wait for us to get back to you with an answer.
We did some brainstorming to figure out what would be best to display when things weren’t going to plan. After some tweaking, we pull more info from the code to include a summary of the stacktrace, focusing on the specific exceptions reported and the error code. A stack trace is a report that is commonly used for debugging as it pops up when an error or an exception happens. Showing these three things gives a lot more context to what’s going on and can help fix what’s causing the error.
Here, it’s better but not great. A wall of text is hard to read, and a wall of technical text is even harder. That’s why we kept on working at it. So we have all this info now and a bit more context about what’s actually going on, but can we easily read it? No. Back to the drawing board!
To make things more readable, we added a header to say Caused by (to make the language more human) and spaced out the content. We’ve also added buttons for the next steps. The first button, ‘Find a solution,’ takes your specific error and exceptions and takes you directly to the help page with the info that you need to get things sorted.
Self-help is a great way to resolve an issue on your own time. It’s great if you:
- Want to get things done straight away and quickly
- Don’t like to pick up a phone or email support
- Find it can be hard to put your experience into words
If you click on our ‘Email 24x7 support’ button, it populates your specific error and exceptions into an email to us, and then you just need to add any extra info that it doesn’t cover. We’ve done this because:
- It can be hard to know what’s helpful to include in a message - this way; we’ve got key details about what’s going on straight away.
- Saves back and forth communication as it’ll provide what the support staff would ask up front
- It provides a direct link to our dedicated 24x7 support
We recommend that you pair EasySSO with User Management for JIRA and Confluence. This way, you save time for managing your users by also having a single sign-on app. Visit the Atlassian Marketplace for more info about our products.
Why we made this change
Entering your email address and password, again and again, is boring and annoying. We created EasySSO back in 2013 to save you time. Through EasySSO, you can authenticate your users via Kerberos, NTLMv2, SAML, X.509 or HTTP Headers, Single Sign-On (SSO) based on the current domain workstation session - no login screen and no passwords needed. EasySSO makes the login process a whole lot less complicated!
So if any issues did pop up along the way, it’ll be a lot easier to fix them. At TechTime, we’re always looking for ways to improve our processes and our products. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to reach out.