3. KronoDesk

We had a customer that needed to load in a batch of customer users into our KronoDesk service desk platform. The built-in Excel add-on is only able to import help desk tickets, not users. So in this article we explain how you can use Rapise to bulk load in the data using the KronoDesk REST API.

We had a customer that was integrating Spira that was hosted on-premise with a cloud instance of KronoDesk. When they used the feature to log the incident in Spira from a KronoDesk ticket, the incident was created in Spira, but the information did not reflect back in KronoDesk, and an error message was displayed.

Spira and KronoDesk let you import existing users from LDAP into the system. That will bring over the users, and also link their user profile to their LDAP user by means of the LDAP Distinguished Name (or DN). However if you move a user in the LDAP folder structure, it may break the link with Spira, resulting in that user not being able to login.

Most on-premise Spira and KronoDesk installations will be using the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Server to serve the application to users.  If you are experiencing performance problems or slow page load times (and you cannot move to our cloud version), this article will help you troubleshoot IIS worker process requests.

We had a customer that was using a VPN / Firewall to access our cloud instances of Spira. Most firewalls simply pass through the HTTPS traffic on port 443 unaltered. However some more stringent ones actually decrypt the HTTPS traffic, inspect the packets and then re-encrypt it for the user. In one case, this was causing an ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED error.

When using Spira or KronoDesk on a separate web and database server, the easiest configuration is to use SQL Server authentication to connect between the web server and database. However that means hard coding a password in the web server (in the Web.config file). So in this article we explain how to use Windows Integrated Authentication instead.

This article provides some information on the maintenance activities we do on our cloud platform

As you move your web applications (such as SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk) to newer encryption protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2, you will need to make sure the client applications are configured to use the latest version of TLS. Specifically applications using Microsoft .NET may not use the latest version by default.

For additional security, customers may want to limit who can access their cloud instances of SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk to specific networks and IP addresses. This article describes why you would want to do this and how we support this.

Sometimes when you use Spira or KronoDesk and perform actions (e.g. assigning bugs, test cases, etc.) email notifications are not received correctly. This article provides some common reasons and solutions

The SQL Server Database Engine Tuning Advisor examines how queries are processed in the databases you specify, and then recommends how you can improve query processing performance by modifying database structures such as indexes, indexed views, and partitioning. This can be used by on-premise customers to improve the performance of their Spira and KronoDesk instances.

Sometimes it is necessary to move a SpiraTeam, SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk installation to another server, without wanting to lose all of your data. This KB will guide you through the steps of transferring the install over, and optionally upgrading the application. This guide will walk you through the recommended steps when needing to move both the application and database to new servers.

When you are installing SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan or KronoDesk on a database server with a large 'model' database sometimes the install will fail because the initial Spira/KronoDesk database is not large enough to contain your model database. This article provides the solution

Sometimes customers want to download their list of tickets and file attachments. This article explains how to read the data that we provide.

If you have disabled TLS 1.0 and 1.1 encryption protocols on your IIS web server, you may run into issues accessing the web interface of Spira or KronoDesk from older versions of Windows and/or IE.

This post shows you how you can migrate or downgrade a SQL Server database from one version to a lower or earlier one. E.g. 2016 to 2014, 2014 to 2012, 2012 to 2008 etc. This can be useful if you maintain a heterogeneous environment of SQL Server instances and you have a backup from a newer version that needs to be hosted onto an older version. This happens to us quite a bit when customers installed a trial on SQL Server Express (latest version) and we need to host it on one our cloud servers.

When you install SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, or KronoDesk on premise, you have a choice in different ways to configure SQL Server. Every situation is different, but this article presents some recommendations.

By default, IIS web server allows for limited file size to be uploaded to the web server. For IIS 6 and IIS 7, the default maximum file upload size is 4 MB and 28.6 MB respectively. IIS 7 returns a 404 error (HTTP Error 404.13 - CONTENT_LENGTH_TOO_LARGE) if someone uploads something larger than 30MB. In order to allow for larger file size uploads, a few server changes are required.

With the latest version of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam, we have provided a simple button in the Data Tools section that lets you rebuild the database indexes using the same script that we published in KB10. However sometimes the database is so large that the execution takes longer than the 30 minutes allowed by the application, or you want more control over the fragmentation levels that trigger a rebuild. This article provides guidance and a more advanced script for power users.

Sometimes, when troubleshooting complex issues with SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk, it's necessary for us to get some additional information to troubleshoot the issue further. For example, when we receive a report of performance trouble when using our cloud services, there are a lot of different factors that may contribute to the problem. To narrow down the cause of the performance problem, we need more data.

This article describes how to export server Event Logs when requested by support.

You already know the advantages of us hosting your application in our cloud:

Our web-based products: SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam and KronoDesk make use of the Microsoft IIS web-server and Microsoft SQL Server database platforms.

This KB article explains some of the more common error messages that can occur after installing one of our products and the steps to remedy them.

This article was written specifically for versions v3.0 - v4.2 of Spira and versions v1.x of KronoDesk.

One of the benefits of using Inflectra software is that you get unlimited upgrades for the first year and as long as you maintain an active service plan. This articles describes the process for upgrading your installation of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk to the latest version. It also answers many common questions about the process.

If you face performance issues with Spira or KronoDesk when the users use Internet Explorer 9.0, there is a known issue in ASP.NET 4.5 that can cause the client to disconnect and all subsequent AJAX calls do not get processed. This article describes the symptoms and the solution.

If you are running a web application (such as SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk) on an IIS web server using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), you will want to harden the environment by removing the older versions of SSL and TLS that are no longer considered secure.

These steps apply to:

• Windows Server 2003 R1 & R2
• Windows Server 2008 R1 & R2

Usually Windows Server 2012 and later are already configured to be secure.

If you run one of our installation packages (.msi) and receive the following message:

A DLL required for this install to complete could not be run

Sometimes we get help desk tickets from on-premise customers regarding the performance of our web-based applications (SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam and KronoDesk). Whilst every situation is different, this article provides some common best practices that should help having a high-performing system.

SpiraTest, SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam versions older than v4.1 and KronoDesk versions lower than v1.1.0.7 use a screenshot capture utility written using the Java development platform. This lets the web browser capture a screenshot and attach it to items in the system without having to first save the item. This article describes some issues using this applet and outlines the replacement plan we have implemented to use HTML5 instead of Java going forward.

If you ever see the following message in the Application Event Logs on your SQL Server database server:

SQL Server has encountered X occurrence(s) of I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file [Path to either your database's MDF or LDF files]

It can often mean that the Size/Shrink settings for the database files are not correct for the size of database. This articles suggestions some techniques for fixing this error message.

When using some versions of Java with SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk you may get the following warning message when pasting in screenshots or images:

When I click to paste a screenshot attachment, get Java security warning (see screenshot) which says " Block potentially unsafe components from being run?  Application: appSupa  Java has discovered application components that could indicate a security concern. Contact the application vendor to ensure that it has not been tampered with" with options to Block and Unblock.   "The application contains both signed and unsigned code".

Sometimes after your instance of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk is upgraded (or you upgrade an on-premise edition), the screen doesn't display correctly.

This article describes how to resolve the following error message that can occur on new installations of SpiraTest, SpiraPlan, SpiraTeam or KronoDesk when ASP.NET is not correctly configured. This message typically only occurs on Windows Vista, Windows7 or Windows 2008 Server.

HTTP Error 500.21 - Internal Server Error
Handler "PageHandlerFactory-Integrated" has a bad module "ManagedPipelineHandler" in its module list.