Diagnosing DeskDirector Desktop Portal Issues

Jason He Updated by Jason He

This article explain ways to diagnose issues for desktop portal. Information gathered through the process is also great to help out any support ticket you create. It can help us resolve your issue faster.

About the DeskDirector Desktop Portal

The DeskDirector desktop portal is an electron app. It is essentially a Chromium browser with web portal inside. At the time this article is written, the latest version is v4.x.x and this contained an update to the electron version. Here's an article you can check detailing the difference of the old desktop portal v2 compared to v3/v4.

Check Portal Version

There's been a lot of improvements and bug fixes released on the latest version of the DeskDirector Desktop portal. The best first step in isolating any issue with the desktop portal is to you use the latest version of it. You can get your version from the Help menu.

Our support team also needs this information when you reach out to support for help.

Checking User Information

When an issue occurs for the desktop portal, we should first check who actually logged in. Many times, an email address could be associated with multiple users. This can only be performed in the desktop portal that already has a user logged in.

Open the desktop portal and press Ctrl + Shift + O (windows), or Cmd + Shift + O (Mac). You should be able to see diagnostic page of portal.

For web portal, this page can be found at: https://{sub-domain}.deskdirector.com/portal/v2/diagnostic

From this view, you can see the user ID is 11612. When you go to same user inside admin console, you can check the URL of the user page. Is the ID same?

For example, below is admin console's contact profile page, it has same email as the image above, but they are different contact. The ID of the link below is 9712, where the ID of above is 11612.

Other userful information are:

  • Permissions
  • Company that's belong to
  • Any feature been enabled, disabled
  • Portal version
  • Portal's release time
Developer Console

It also known as DevTools on Firefox or Developer Tools on Chromium. You can press Ctrl + Shift + I or Cmd + Shift + I. What you will see is following image.

  • Desktop version 3, 4 you can use Ctrl + Shift + I or Cmd + Shift + I
  • Desktop version 5 you can simply press F12

You can click on Dock side to open that panel to a new window. That way, you have bigger view.

A. Console Panel

Inside Console Panel, you can see logs of application. If there is any error from web portal, it should appear there.

You can also expand the error to get more detail, such as the warning message below. Error message should display in red.

B. Network Panel

Network panel should be empty when you open the developer console. Any HTTP request initialized after you opened developer console, should display there.

You can navigate to other pages then back, to check all the request happening on the problematic page. You can also reload the portal, by going to View > Reload. Or press Ctrl + R.

For any errors you see, please screenshot the Headers View.

You should also copy over the value from response tab. So our support or development team can review the response from the server.

It is important to copy over as text, not an image as that will make reviewing the issue easier from our end.
Check User Sessions

The cookie under the Application tab contains the information for the current user session.

Authentication

To diagnose single sign on through active directory, you can check on article Diagnosing login problems using the new DDGetSID CLI tool

How did we do?

DD Portal for Mac: Labtech Deployment Guide

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