I ran into an indexing issue a while back with Coveo for Sitecore which involved a bit of troubleshooting. When you are working with a platform like Coveo its not always obvious where to start troubleshooting. In this post, I’ll provide some practical steps to help you troubleshoot issues you might run into and get you unstuck and back doing fun stuff with Coveo and Sitecore.
1. Check the Coveo for Sitecore Diagnostics page
The Diagnostics page allows you to verify that Coveo For Sitecore installed successfully and you are able to index items to the Coveo Cloud. This should be your first stop.
It provides a list of all the major modules that make up Coveo for Sitecore, along with a status for each one of them. Validate that all components are working correctly.
For a fully working Coveo for Sitecore instances, components should all be in the “Up and running” state. If any module is down you will see an error message. Inspect any errors and take appropriate action to resolve.
2. Review the list of Known Coveo Issues
Coveo has published a list known issues with symptoms, cause, and a workaround. Review this list and see if any of the symptoms match the issue you are experiencing.
3. Review the list of most Common Issues
This is a list of the most common issues developers run into when working with Coveo for Sitecore. Similar to the known issues they provide the symptoms, cause, but instead of a workaround they provide the resolution.
As it turned out the issue I had was listed right here. Now if only I had known this list existed at the time it would have saved me a bunch of time instead, I burned a lot more effort trying to diagnose the issue.
4. Sniff the wire for errors between Sitecore & Coveo
Depending on the nature of your issue you might need to check the HTTP(s) traffic between Sitecore and Coveo to see if any errors are being generated. There are several tools available to help you do this Wireshark and Fiddler. Coveo provide a simple guide on how to filter and monitor traffic using Fiddler and what you should be looking for.
If you have open a support case with Coveo and depending on the type of issue – for example, if its related to indexing then support might ask you to provide a copy of the Traffic captured by Fiddler. Providing this up-front could help them diagnose your issue quicker.
5. Analyze the GET & POST response generated by Coveo Search
Analyzing the GET and POST responses reveals useful information that can be helpful when diagnosing issues related to the Coveo Search components. Again Coveo has provided a helpful guide on how you can do this using Chrome Developer tools and what you should be looking for.
6. Check Online Resources
The following resources are also available online and can help you solve Coveo related issues:
- Troubleshooting Guides – Coveo also provided two useful guides to help troubleshoot Cloud and On-Premise.
- Coveo Knowledge Base – here you will find articles on tips, tricks, and various Coveo topics from their team of Product Specialists.
- Sitecore Stack Exchange – this is where are all the awesome Sitecore people are hanging out these days to answers your Sitecore related queries.
- Sitecore Slack Community – has a dedicated Coveo Channel.
7. Create a Coveo Support Case
If you have a Coveo Support Contract then you have access to their support portal and can create and manage support cases as a Coveo Customer or as a Partner on behalf of your customer. The support team is pretty awesome in helping you diagnose and resolve issues quickly.
Useful Tools
Useful Links
- Resolving Coveo For Sitecore most common Issues
- Known Coveo Issues
- Analyzing HTTP Traffic Using Chrome Developer Tools
- Tracing HTTP(s) communications issued by Sitecore
- Troubleshooting Guide – Coveo Cloud
- Troubleshooting Guide – Coveo On-Premise
Have fun!
Neil Killen 