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Finesse agents suffering from AutomaticTabDiscarding Chrome feature

Hello all,

We have a Contact Center Express deployment 11.6(2) and the agents use Finesse on Chrome.

Our reporting team noticed in the "Agent State Detail Report" that many agents are frequently getting Logged out with the cause "Connection Failure". Now Cisco documentation tells that some possible causes are "Finesse tab closed" or "browser crashed".

 

Digging further on this issue we found out that during an active call (the agent is going back and forth through the CRM, the Ticketing, the Monitoring portals etc.) and after a while (few minutes or so), when the agent returns back to Finesse tab, the tab immediately refreshes like if he's logging in freshly.

After some troubleshooting, it seems that when the RAM of the Agent PC gets low, Chrome kicks in a new feature called Automatic Tab Discarding, which is basically killing the Finesse tab...

This feature can be disabled in Chrome through chrome://flags, or I can selectively prevent the Finesse tab from being discarded in chrome://discards/ (but the latter is not persistant i.e. when we close the Finesse tab and reopen it, we have to prevent it from being discarded again...)

 

The problem is that there's no way to implement an enterprise-wide solution (as far as Google documentation is concerned) to disable this *catastrophic* feature causing outage for Finesse when many tabs are opened in Chrome.

 

Our supervisors are using the "Agent State Detail Report" in order to count the "Not Ready - Coffee Pause" that each agent took, however, when the 'Logged-out Connection Failure" kicks in, the count of Not Ready stops. (ie the agent put himself Not Ready and goes for a 10-minute pause before returning to Ready state, and the logout Connection Failure appears after 3 minutes, then the Not Ready State stops after 3 minutes)

Do you guys face this issue ? How are you dealing with it ? Is there a way to implement an enterprise-wide solution (GPO for example) for it ?

 

Thank you for your inputs.

38 Replies 38

Anthony Holloway
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Wow! I find this very interesting. Thank you for posting about this, and I look forward to seeing how this develops. Bookmarked!

 

EDIT: When Google announced this feature, the comments just trashed it.  And that was 2 years ago!

Hi Anthony,

Thank you for your review.

I think the problem is worse than I expected. In fact when Chrome kills the Finesse tab and the agent is in "Talking" state, not only the Talking state duration will be tampered, but also the call statistics, including the "Talk Time" in "Detailed Call CSQ Agent Report" will be wrongly counted (since Finesse transitioned from Talking to Logout, but the call is still in progress).

I have read the link you posted, seems that everybody is angry about this enabled by default feature.

The worst thing is that this will be unpredictable (as long as Chrome doesn't exclude Finesse tab as an option to discard) when the agent uses many tabs. Here's what it looks like when Finesse tab is killed, this is easily reproducible. (for reliabilty purpose, I think Finesse should not enter in competition with other tabs, such as Youtube)

 

I'm clueless about that.

Brian Meade
Level 7
Level 7

This seems to have some pretty wide-spread connotations.  I noticed today that deploying an OVA with vSphere Web Client in Chrome kept failing over and over.  It worked as soon as I kept the tab visible the entire time.

 

I would think this would affect any sort of upload going on in the background of another tab.

This is kinda crazy. If you disable the feature manually, does Chrome then consume all your RAM and your PC just slows down to a crawl? Is there a way to only disable this for a single tab?

That's how it worked in the past so a lot of tabs would start to cause performance issues on your PCs.

 

It looks like you can disable for specific tabs at the chrome://discards page but that has to be done each time the browser is restarted so you can't necessarily always exclude Finesse.

The chrome://discards/ page shows some interesting info. Some sites are marked as not available for freezing or discarding. The reason given for my servicenow site is "Origin has been observed updating favicon while backgrounded." So it seems there is a certain way to make a page so chrome won't discard it. If that could get added to the Finesse site, it could help solve this issue.

 

There is also another thread on here that is worth looking at. https://community.cisco.com/t5/contact-center/50002-what-is-considered-statistically-normal-versus-high/m-p/3746024

You might want to hit up TAC with this information. This seems like something which should be an emergency fix as Chrome is now a supported browser.

 

david

David hit the nail on the head. Even if Cisco won't/can't fix the bug (although I hope they can and don't just point to Google to fix it), even if it is documented as a defect would be helpful.

Hi Mohammed, did you ever open a TAC case re: this and was a defect created for this issue (and/or a fix)?

Hi Bill,

No, I didn't open a TAC case for this defect.

We just told the agents to leave Finesse window active before taking a Pause Café.

 

Regards,

Jaafar

Cisco TAC thinks the issue could be related to CSCvo90707. We will be trying a setting change in Chrome to disable background timer throttling and see if it helps.

Thank you for sharing. When I clicked on the link for that bug it says I don't have sufficient permission to view it with my access, but please let us know how it turns out.

Joe, thank you for your help. Coul you share the information about the bug CSCvo90707. We can not open. This bug contains proprietary information and is not yet publicly available.

Kind Regards. 

Luis Coiro

This is the bug information. Changing this setting did not help our users with this issue.

Description:
Google Chrome is a supported browser for Finesse.
The documentation does not specifically call out that Chrome must be configured with "background_timer_throttling" set so that it does not time out and close the session to the server.
This needs to be specifically called out in the configuration guide, as this affects only Chrome when it is used.
Feature is discussed here: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/03/background_tabs

Symptom:
Finesse sessions time out and log agents out when using Chrome.
Other browsers are unaffected.

Conditions:
Finesse is used with Chrome.

Workaround:
Chrome must be configured with "background_timer_throttling" set so that it does not time out and close the session to the server.
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