Basic and Advanced Network Troubleshooting

If you are trying to connect to Salesforce and are having problems with slowness or latency, this article will help you determine if the root cause is with your infrastructure, a 3rd party ISP, or with Salesforce. Our Support Teams need data to help you troubleshoot the problem and will ask you to provide traceroute and ping data along with answers to basic questions needed to develop an accurate Problem Definition. Be prepared to share the traceroute and ping results with us when asking for help with a suspected Network Performance Issue.

Initial Troubleshooting:

If you are trying to connect to Salesforce and are having problems with slowness or latency, this article will show you how to run a Ping test and Traceroute to find out where the slowness is coming from. Before troubleshooting network issues, we recommend checking a few areas to ensure it is not a known issue with a resolution already in progress.
 

1. Check Trust
The first thing you should always do in these cases is to check status.salesforce.com . The Salesforce Status page on Trust will report any ongoing incidents and maintenance activity that may be impacting your instance. In addition to Salesforce activity, we will also occasionally post general status messages if we are engaged with an ISP to work through any networking issues.
 

2. Establish a Problem Definition and Start Time
When was the first time you noticed a problem connecting to your Salesforce instance?
How often is the problem occurring? Consistently? Randomly?
Can you easily reproduce the problem if asked to do so by Salesforce Support?
 

3. Ask your colleagues.
Check if your teammates are also experiencing the same level of performance and whether they have found any ways to mitigate it. For example, you always use a hard line connection but you have a colleague who uses WiFi and they are not experiencing the issue. Also, if your company has multiple offices or remote employees please try and check with them - are they seeing a better performance? Does your team have the same performance experience across all your orgs (including sandboxes)? Are you on or off a VPN? Testing on an alternate network would be very beneficial. If any of these scenarios are applicable to this issue then you are very likely experiencing a networking problem and not a Salesforce-specific problem.
 

4. Check other applications
Are you experiencing slow response times in other applications or when browsing to other websites?
 

5. Check for local IT changes or issues
Depending on the size of your organization, check with your internal Helpdesk to see if there were any local changes made or issues underway that could be causing a connectivity issue.

Basic Network-Specific Troubleshooting

If no Salesforce Application issues are identified, Salesforce Support will ask you to provide Basic Network-Specific Troubleshooting steps that can be analyzed by our Engineers. Having this information ready will help the investigation.
 

1. Use ping and traceroute
The ping & traceroute diagnostic tools provide a quick way to determine whether the issue is with your local network, your ISP, or Salesforce. You or someone in your Organization will need to run them and provide output to the Salesforce Support Team in order to determine if this is a Network Performance issue and where it resides.

Steps can be found in this article: Use Pings and Traceroutes to Troubleshoot Network Issues

NOTE:
Hyperforce uses Network Load Balancers(NLBs), which don’t support pings (and by proxy tracert). On NLBs, ICMP Packets except for Type 3 (Destination Unreachable) are considered “Unintended traffic” and are not forwarded to any targets.

2. Find and write down your Public IP
When reporting a Network Performance issue to Salesforce Support you will need to provide the Support Engineers with your public IP address. To obtain your public IP address, you can use sites such as http://whatismyip.com.
 

3. Provide Basic Network Troubleshooting Findings:
My Public IP Address:

Traceroute output file:
Ping output file:

Date and Time problem first noticed:
Can I easily reproduce the issue? (Y/N):
Have I or my local HelpDesk confirmed no local changes have been made? (Y/N):
 

Advanced Network-Specific Troubleshooting

If there is a network problem on the your local network, an internet service provider (ISP), or on the Salesforce network is suspected, then additional troubleshooting steps will be required to identify and resolve it. These advanced network troubleshooting steps are best handled by your organization’s network engineers.

Please note that the suspected Network Issue must be easily reproducible as these captures need to be done when the issue is occurring.
 

1. Perform a Network Packet Capture (PCAP) from your External Network Endpoint
Salesforce will need a packet capture completed from your organization’s external network endpoint, such as an external firewall interface, in order to analyze the underlying network protocols being used for your organization to connect with Salesforce’s network. If your end point is hosted in a 3rd party cloud (Google Public Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc) you will need to contact the vendor and have their support team take the capture for you.

Built-in packet capture tools, such as tcpdump, and downloadable tools such as Wireshark are used for capturing and analyzing PCAP files.
 

2. Perform a Network Packet Capture from Salesforce Network Endpoint (Done By Salesforce)
If the suspected network issue is on the Salesforce side, we will schedule a meeting for our network engineers to collect a PCAP from our endpoint while your team reproduces the issue and collects a PCAP from your endpoint.

In order to complete this step, the customer must be able to do the following:

1. Perform the test connection to a specified IP address (requires DNS or host file configuration)

2. Reproduce the issue during the capture

3. Perform a simultaneous packet capture from an external endpoint and provide to Salesforce Support

Contact Salesforce Support

If you are unable to pinpoint any networking issues, please send all the information you have collected using the steps above to Salesforce support and we will take a closer look at the issue. In addition to the traceroute and ping described above, you will also want to include login access, the steps to reproduce the slowness you are seeing, and the name of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) as well as whether your ISP has provided any insight into the latency.