Users may encounter runtime errors when trying to connect to your partners. To troubleshoot these errors, investigating the user activities (in terms of the requests and the responses between the client and the PingFederate server) helps determining the root cause.

Client side
Use built-in developer tools from the browsers to analyze HTTP traffic. Alternatively, you can use third-party tools, such as Fiddler (www.telerik.com/fiddler) and Charles (www.charlesproxy.com).
Server side
Review server log messages to investigate what PingFederate has received from the client.
On rare occasions, you may also use third-party tools, such as Wireshark (www.wireshark.org), or tools from the operating systems, such as tcpdump (www.tcpdump.org), to capture network traffic on the PingFederate server.
Tip:

For instructions, please refer to the documentation of the third-party tools.

To correlate server log messages to user activities, you can use one of the following factors:

  • The tracking ID, which can be configured to be shown in the user-facing error pages in PingFederate 7.2 (or a more recent version).
  • The PF cookie value, which requires capturing the HTTP headers on the client side.
  • Real-time monitoring of the server log, which works well if the issues can be replicated reliably and involves using tools from the operating systems or third-party vendors.