Finesse agents suffering from AutomaticTabDiscarding Chrome feature

[Mohamed Amine Jaafar]

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.

[bill.king1]

At least for me, this bug is now visible.

[ssielaff]

I have had quite a few problems with Chome and with Firefox when using finesse.  Things like the mouse stops being able to make selections in finesse.

2 days ago I started to use Opera.  I have not had any issues.  It may be something to check out.

[Anusha B R]

Hi,

In which version you have observed this behavior?

Best Regards,

[Omar Deen]

I have ran into this problem on the UCCE side. It's extremely disruptive. Customer has moved to another browser for now

[fourier.ross1]

Would running Finesse in its own window and configuring Chrome to open a new window instead of a tab help with this issue.

[eric.tucker@tridengroup.com]

Its not just Chrome its FireFox as well version  69.0.1

This happens when an agent is idled on something, meeting, training, and most commonly Lunch and break. A majority of them occur when idled for breaks and lunches, but also when an agent has started the log out process. So I don’t think calls are being affected, just not accounting for the idle times.

Since it happens most frequently to Rebecca, I asked her what she was experiencing. When an agent comes back to their phone, Finesse has a message on the screen that says “Waiting to Reconnect” and will stay in that state until it reconnects, which can take 10 or 15 minutes. But if an agent refreshes the screen, they can log back in.

I looked at a report from September last year and found it was occurring then. I don’t know how far back, I didn’t notice it as a problem until I found it happened to Rebecca almost every break or lunch one week.

Here are a few examples of what status an agent was in when the Connection Failure occurred. As you can see it occurs with agents in various states, including Ready. Angela’s second example, while Talking, may have interrupted the call, but she doesn’t remember if it was after the call had ended.

Angela  2005 10/13/19 2:58:09 PM Ready 0:06:17
Angela  2005 10/13/19 3:04:26 PM Logout Connection Failure 0:00:00

Angela  2005 10/15/19 1:25:27 PM Talking 0:09:31
Angela  2005 10/15/19 1:34:58 PM Logout Connection Failure 0:00:00

Bobbie H 2125 10/15/19 2:43:47 PM Not Ready A Sign Out 0:01:03
Bobbie H 2125 10/15/19 2:44:50 PM Logout Connection Failure 0:00:00

Charles H 2163 10/16/19 10:17:33 AM Not Ready Lunch 0:32:56
Charles H 2163 10/16/19 10:50:29 AM Logout Connection Failure 0:00:00

Rebecca P 2123 10/16/19 2:00:34 PM Not Ready Break 0:02:55
Rebecca P 2123 10/16/19 2:03:29 PM Logout Connection Failure 0:00:00

Stacy M 2011 10/17/19 10:03:31 AM Not Ready Call Backs 1:16:23
Stacy M 2011 10/17/19 11:19:54 AM Logout Connection Failure 0:00:00

[Anthony Holloway]

Move to a next generation browser based app they said. It's better than CAD they said. Lies!

[ampdeck]

can you share a little bit of history why they moved to Finesse and since what version they started? Sorry I'm new to contact center field

[Anthony Holloway]

I don't know why they moved to Finesse, other than to follow industry trends for creating web apps. Software as a service man, it's all the rage!

The promise to us was that it would remove the headache of having to manage software installs on PCs. Except they forgot to mention the requirements for certificates, so now we have to manage certificates on PCs.

Another promise was to get rid of the operating system dependency, because it's just a website, however Cisco still dictates the supported operating systems for finesse,and truly, replacing that dependency with a browser version dependency is worse. It's actually harder to maintain the browser version and settings, than it is to maintain an OS.

The last promise was "high level of customization." However, most customers don't have what it takes to customize finesse. It's too complex. Leaving the real customization to companies like 2Ring who sell a whole new server, support contract, and another vendor to manage.

Cisco introduced Finesse in UCCX 10.0, and it was hot garbage. It could barely do more than login, go ready, and take an inbound call. To this day, it still lacks common features like showing the agent which queue the call came in on, or how long the caller waited to speak to the Agent. All things CAD did by default.

[david.macias]

Is there any logging on FF which shows this happening? Curious if there's a way to mitigate?

david

[Anthony Holloway]

I'm not sure about logging, but according to this article:

https://techdows.com/2019/05/how-to-stop-firefox-67-from-suspending-tabs.html

You use about:config and set browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory to false and restart the browser.

Apparently Mozilla is backing out of this change, due to poor implementation:

https://techdows.com/2019/06/mozilla-to-turn-off-tab-unloading-in-firefox-due-to-flaws-in-low-memory-detection.html

I'm going to build my own browser now...brb

[ampdeck]

wow I have TAC case open due to Finesse v11.6 as we are using IE for Finesse agents and was advised to use FF. Great day.

[bill.king1]

I can't say for certain, but if you're using Firefox 69, that means you're using the non-ESR (aka regular) version. There are several instances where Cisco specifies using the ESR version, so you might want to give that a try to see if it makes a difference in this case/behavior. Here's the compatibility matrix about it for instance.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cust_contact/contact_center/icm_enterprise/ucce_compatibility/matrix/ucce_11_6_x_compat.html#Supported_Browsers

[bill.king1]

Here's hoping that no one on this thread had to deal with this issue.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/15/20966237/google-chrome-white-tab-screen-crash-experiment-it-admins

[Anthony Holloway]

Wow. Turn off automatic updates.