If you are an Oracle Service Cloud administrator, you are likely the first person in your company your agents will go to when they are experiencing some error with their agent desktop. Troubleshooting errors can quickly spawn into a bigger investigative effort to identify the root cause (e.g., network issue, configuration issue, training, defect), but the troubleshooting process usually starts with getting the right details about the error from your agents. Your agents are already frustrated because an error could be impeding their work and impacting their metrics. And now you’re asking them to provide detailed information on the error: steps to reproduce this issue, workstation information or data traffic, much of which they aren’t familiar with.
Recognizing the dynamics of this common scenario, we decided to walk a mile in both your shoes, as the administrator, and your agents’ shoes. As a result of this experience, we came up with the idea of automating the process for gathering the needed information from agents instead of requiring the administrators and agents to try and overcome the current challenges. We developed a sample code named as “Troubleshoot Add-In” for the Oracle Service Cloud Agent Desktop (For the Browser UI version) to address this need.
The “Troubleshoot Add-In Sample Code” was created to automatically capture information, such as steps-to-reproduce, and workstation information in one fell swoop instead of requiring agents to install or use different tools outside of Oracle Service Cloud. All that agents need to do is push the “start” button (located in the status bar) and push the “stop” when the agents have completed all steps to reproduce the error.
Take a look at these two scenarios and see how the “Troubleshoot Add-In” can improve communication between administrators and agents who are encountering an issue.
Let’s take a more in-depth look at what the sample code delivers. The sample code is implementing an Extension StatusBar with a start and stop button, plus a timer that provides the duration of how long your agent is capturing the steps to reproduce.
How Troubleshoot Add-In Sample Code Works
By clicking on the start button, a friendly loading form shows up. You can personalize your message by changing a ServerConfigProperty used in this sample code. At this moment, the sample code will start a standard windows application called PSR (Problem Steps to Reproduce). As a sample code, this code is limited to use a windows standard application and from here, I would encourage you as a developer to expand this sample code for your needs.
For instance, If you want to get rid of Fiddler installation needs, you can use Fiddler Core and embed their .dll to capture data traffic plus steps to reproduce. Check out for Fiddler Demo Code and try yourself, I am pretty sure it will be useful.
Once you have finished capturing your steps to reproduce click on the stop button and the sample code closes PSR and starts to capture workstation information such as .NET version, windows version, capacity. Also, you can run the OSCinfo.bat as described in the answer 2412. This sample code is providing this option if you need to capture more information as ping and traces. See for the ServerConfigProperty options.
Lastly, a message pops up to inform the agent where the results were saved. The sample code takes care of compile and compresses all files resulted from PSR and Workstation Information in a local folder or wherever folder you have specified in a ServerConfigProperty.
Okay, this is true, I like to use ServerConfigProperty and there is more fo them. With that, you can set up your add-in without changing your code.
Ultimately, this solution should simplify your communication with agents experiencing errors, accelerate troubleshooting by having the required information in one easy step, and save everyone time and frustration that surrounds these issues.
The source code is available here for download, and you take advantage to build a better troubleshoot model integrated into your Oracle Service Cloud.
If you are a developer and want to contribute to this sample code, you are welcome to join the Github.