User Story

"As a Compass user with commercial support, I want to easily copy and paste diagnostic info when a connection fails so that I can include it in the SFSC I open enabling faster resolution from MongoDB Support"

Summary

> Note @lucas: Updated with complete context per COMPASS-2848

When customers are having problems connecting via Compass we can now provide a much better experience than instructing customers to enable debugging and open the devtools console (see CS-32525).

Gathering Diagnostic Data

mongodb-connection-model@5.0.0 added a new `status` event. These status events are propagated via mongodb-data-service. Status events are emitted while establishing a connection for each step in the process. Each step has an underlying with a human-readable message property and one property pending||error||complete||skipped.

The implementation of these steps/checks can be found in mongodb-connection-model/lib/connect.js (line 170 at time of this writing).

Steps Explained

The possible values for a status event message are:

• Validate Validate the user input against mongodb-connection-model's business logic
• Load SSL files Checks that the SSL files specified by the user are readable (if specified)
• Create SSH Tunnel Checks that SSH Tunnel can be successfully created and written to (if specified)
• Connect to MongoDB Given all of the above, can we connect to MongoDB using the node.js driver?
• List Databases Inactive. See below.

Example Usage

test: function(done) {
  var onTested = function(err) {
    if (err) {
      metrics.error(err);
      return done(err);
    }

    debug('test worked!');
    done(null, this);
  }.bind(this);
  var diagnosticMessages = [];

  var dataService = new DataService(this);
  debug('Testing connection to `%j`...', this.serialize());
  dataService.on('status', (evt) => {
    /**
     * Example status events:
     *
     * >>> { message: 'Validate', pending: true }
     * >>> { message: 'Validate', complete: true }
     * >>> { message: 'Load SSL files', pending: true }
     * >>> { message: 'Load SSL files', skipped: true, reason: 'The selected SSL mode does not need to load any files.' }
     * >>>  { message: 'Create SSH Tunnel', pending: true }
     * >>>  { message: 'Create SSH Tunnel', complete: true}
     * >>> { message: 'Connect to MongoDB', pending: true }
     * >>> { message: 'Connect to MongoDB', complete: true }
     * >>> { message: 'Connect to MongoDB', error: MongoError('Invalid or missing certificate', stack: 'Error: self signed certificate in certificate chain...') }
     */
     // TODO Write these as nice messages to populate the diagnostic info
  });
  dataService.connect(onTested);
  return this;
}

List Databases

This is currently commented out in mongodb-connection-model and here is the primary reason: it's tricky to actually listDatabases(). The actual command requires the authenticated mongodb user to have escalated privileges. However, there is a workaround detailed in mongodb-data-service/lib/instance-detail-helper.js.

This workaround leverages the server's connectionStatus and userInfo commands. It's complicated but very possible to list collections and databases without having underlying escalated privs. See the implementation in mongodb-data-service/lib/instance-detail-helper.js starting at roughly line 283.

This underlying complexity would be mitigated by PM-544 (see comments there for more details).

UX

In the Compass connect window, when a connection fails, add a link to show "Diagnostic Info" which toggles textarea containing status event messages. Under the textarea, include a "copy diagnostic info" button which writes the contents of the textarea to the clipboard using electron's clipboard API.

—

Prior Art

RoboMongo

See Robomongo RC8 blog post for more details.

While in the area as this will be at least a minor release, please also refactor to split up the ssh-connection-options which appear to be unnecessarily coupled together as discovered on COMPASS-396:

const opts = {
// TODO: Would be nice to split this into connectOptions (passed to .connect()),
// TODO: ... forwardOutOptions (i.e. srcAddr, dstPort, dstAddr) and
// TODO: ... startLocalSSHServerOptions (e.g. localPort, localAddr)
  readyTimeout: 5000,
  forwardTimeout: 5000,
  keepaliveInterval: 5000,
  srcAddr: '127.0.0.1',    // OS should figure out an ephemeral srcPort
  dstPort: 27000,          // final mongod port
  dstAddr: '10.0.0.131',   // final mongod IP
  localPort: 29000,        // TODO: Choose this ephemeral port randomly
  localAddr: '127.0.0.1',
  host: '35.163.143.252',  // Jump box IP
  port: 22,
  username: 'ec2-user'
};