Error Handling in SS&E Administration

Overview

In general, the help center articles listed under SS&E Administration and Support and Troubleshooting are geared towards Student Success & Engagement users that are assigned the "Administrator" role.

These articles provide resources for SS&E Administrators along with the institution's IT staff. Additional articles about integration and implementation tasks can be found under the help center IT Resources section.

This article aims to provide a quick reference to areas that display errors in SS&E Administration so that Administrators can monitor and quickly identify different integration issues.

In general, when errors display in SS&E Administration, this indicates that something is either incorrect or has changed in the source system data, infrastructure, and/or data integration method.

• Based on the nature of systems and data, error messages do not always represent a real issue since institutions can usually explain and understand what the errors represent and be able to verify and explain if/why/when something has changed intentionally in the source systems.

For example, SS&E generates an error when it finds that SIS or LMS data is "missing" or "mismatched" / data extracts are "out of date" / messages are "failing" to send / gradebooks are "empty" / .csv files are missing etc. since the SS&E system has no way of knowing if this was an end result of an intentional process done in the SIS or LMS systems.

NOTE: If at any time, there is a plan for data source changes that will affect the data flowing into SS&E, reach out to your client success representative or open a support ticket so that this project can be escalated and reviewed by a Technical Services Consultant to prevent the loss of importing timely data.

In order to help prioritize Administrator/IT tasks, following is a list of SS&E Admin menu items where Data Integration related errors may arise.

• Each item is linked to a menu item within SS&E Administration. 
• Click on a link and then replace "yourInstitution" with your subdomain in the browser URL in order to open the link within SS&E.

Quick Links:

Administration Errors

People Administration Errors

LMS Integration Errors

SIS Integration Errors

Messaging Administration Errors

Advanced Administration Errors

Administration Errors

Our recommendation is to monitor these areas for change since the goal should be for errors displayed in Administration to either be "explained" or "resolved".

People Administration

Person Details

• Is the user on the Suppressed Destinations List?
  • • Check the Person Details when the issue being reported is that "Messages sent TO this user display on the Message Report as successfully sent yet are not being "delivered"."
    • Click here for more information about the Email Address Suppresses Destinations List and how to resolve this.

LMS Integration Administration

To view all articles about LMS Integration Administration, click here.

To view all articles about LMS Integration Troubleshooting, click here.

The most common reasons why LMS Data is not syncing properly and/or is missing from SS&E are:

1. Course Section LMS ID missing or mismatch
2. Person LMS ID mismatch
3. Missing Grades/Empty Gradebook
4. The LMS Enrollment Import Batch Job is not completing

LMS Course Resolver Errors

• Shows a list of course sections from the LMS that could not be found in SS&E and the reason it was not validated.
• This report is regenerated each time the LMS Course Resolver runs.
• The LMS Course Resolver is initially configured during implementation so that LMS Course Sections match up with Course Sections in SS&E that are imported from the SIS.
• If anything changes, LMS course sections may not match up properly or may not find any match in the SIS course data. When this happens, LMS data displayed in SS&E (such as current grades, assignment submission and login dates) will either be reported as displayed incorrectly or missing.
• For more information about LMS Data Synchronization, click here.
• For general LMS troubleshooting steps, click here.
• If only one or some students are missing their LMS data, then most likely the student's Person LMS ID is mismatched. For more information and how to resolve this, click here.
• If discovered that course sections imported from the SIS and displayed in Administration do not display the correct Course Section LMS_ID, or are completely missing a Course Section LMS_ID, then the Course Section LMS ID can be updated manually in Course Section Administration. For instructions on how to manually override the Course Section LMS ID, click here.

LMS Import Errors

• Shows a list of Enrollment Data that could not be imported into SS&E, and why the enrollment data could not be synced from the LMS.
• This report is regenerated each time the Enrollment Import runs and syncs with the LMS.
• To better handle Enrollment Import Error messages, click on the Message column header to sort all import errors by message type.
• For more information about Enrollment Import Error examples and how to solve these type of errors, click here.

LMS Course Section Total Format Error Report

• LMS Course Sections must have the total column format configured to a percentage to allow SS&E to alert staff.
• The course sections listed here do not have their total format setup as a percentage.
• For more information, click here.

LMS Course Sections With Empty Gradebooks Report

• This report identifies course sections that do not have current grades. For an example, click here.

The LMS Enrollment Import Job is Failing

• From SS&E Admin, check Advanced Administration -> Batch Processing to see if the LMS Enrollment Import job is running and completing or failing.
• If the job is consistently failing, open a support ticket with Watermark SS&E Support.

SIS Integration Administration

• To view all articles about SIS Integration Administration, click here.
• To view all articles about SIS Integration Troubleshooting, click here.
• To learn about IT Resources - Data Integration changes and troubleshooting, click here.

The most common reported issue is that the SIS Data is not syncing properly and/or is missing from SS&E.

• Click here for an overview of how data flows from the SIS into SS&E and how to identify the source of missing or mismatched data.

Once the source of data inconsistency is identified, this must be resolved so that data displays correctly in SS&E.

In addition:

• The SIS Import Job status should be monitored in Advanced Administration.
• If any data feeds are out of date, this must be resolved first so that current data is importing successfully.

The following table gives a quick overview of the SIS Data Integration troubleshooting steps:

SIS Import Errors

While import errors are a great tool and can be very useful in troubleshooting, sometimes very small issues can produce a large amount of import errors.

• The number of errors cannot be reset or manually cleared from the UI.
• By default, SS&E displays import errors for the past 30 days.
• If loading the Datafeed Administration page is slow, please reach out to support so that they can help check if this is related to having a large number of import errors.

Since the SIS Import job is scheduled to run 4x per day, the number of errors is multiplied by however many times the SIS Import has run that day.

• Filtering the SIS Import Error page to today's date can present a more accurate picture of the import errors that are currently causing an issue.
• In addition, import errors on data feeds such as course, courseSection, transcript, transcriptCourse, etc. will likely cause errors on other data feeds as well where records are associated, eg. the data feed is looking for a matching source system id from the above feeds.
• Essentially, this will happen with any set of associated data feeds, for example: transcript (since this includes primaryDepreeProgramId; secondaryDegreeProgramId), degree, program, degreeProgram, and personDegreeProgram.

For example, a missing course section will cause transcript course and subsequently transcript course status history records to fail. It will also cause any course section schedule element and subsequently transcript course attendance records to fail. What this means is that from one issue - a missing course section, there will be many import errors. As soon as the course section feed is fixed, the related errors will go away.

To check for Import Errors related to missing/mismatched/incorrect data, we recommend:

1. Searching for an error on all relevant data feeds to check for something that is preventing the data from importing at the "file/data feed" level.
2. Searching for the person Id / record Id / course Id, anything that is correctly INCLUDED in the data extract record that is not importing.
   • • Filter by the specific data feed and on all data feeds. 

• If errors are found, this means that the correct data is included in the Data Extract/.Json file yet it is not being imported into SS&E as there is something preventing the data from importing. Once the root cause is identified and resolved, the data will import successfully.
• The Import Error Message will most likely indicate why data is not importing.
  • • To fix an import error, the underlying issue causing the error must be resolved.
    • Once the import error(s) are resolved at the source, they will stop appearing and the correct data should import (unless there are additional errors/issues on the same data feed/record).
• Many of the SIS Import Errors are "expected" based on the nature of data integrations and SIS data changes. The number of import errors usually depends on how institutions are managing data clean up within the SIS source system. Many times, there are import errors on records that are associated with data from the past that is now invalid, missing, or inactive in the SIS; and the benefit of cleaning this up to minimize the number of import errors is not really necessary. This is why many import error messages can most likely be ignored.

Import Error Examples

Tried to overwrite email address/username with null value

In most cases, the "Tried to overwrite email address with null value", "Tried to overwrite username with null value" SIS Import Error Messages can be ignored since they are Person data feed error messages that indicate a null value is importing on a record that already includes a value that cannot and should not be overwritten, unless of course these are directly related to the reported issue and there is a problem being reported on the specific record where these errors appear.

Failed to Parse

"Failed to Parse" means that the data extract is not formatted properly. In most cases, this type of issue originates from a formatting issue that exists in the CSV file/source data. In some cases there may be additional information displayed in External Logging filtering on Log Level "Error" as seen in the data feed Connect errors.

Import Error Troubleshooting Tips

When troubleshooting SIS Import Errors, it is important to remember that:

1. Datafeed field names are case sensitive.
2. Data feeds cannot contain any unexpected fields.
3. If an unexpected field is detected this will cause the data feed to fail to import and a "Failed to parse" error will display for all records on that data feed file in the SIS Import Errors and/or Connect Errors log until this gets resolved.

For more information about SIS Import errors, click here.

Messaging Administration

Message Report Errors

• Click here for a list of Message Delivery Statuses.
• Click here for a list of Message Report Errors. The Message Report errors also display on the Advanced Health Status Messages item, linked from the "failing" message count.

Advanced Administration

For more information about requirements and project steps, please reach out to your client success representative or open a support ticket.

Clients with a support plan may utilize their plan to assist with changes in the institution's environment.