PowerApps and AntiVirus/Firewalls

[Anonymous]

So much of my time using PowerApps has been a VERY frustrating experience dealing with sluggish performance most of the time (especially at certain times of the day), odd errors that crop up all the time in the PowerApps Studio (web dev environment), often having to constantly reload the app in order to get things that "should work" to work again, etc.  Doing things that should take me minutes would take me HOURS due to all the issues and slowness.

Even things like at times the keyboard would go into caps lock most (or shift lock might be a better way to describe it) with no way to turn it off without closing and reloading the app in the studio.  Errors would suddenly crop up in the studio for your code where they did not exist before and should not - but saving, closing, killing the browser window, and reopening your app and all is well again (for a while).

So I FINALLY switched away from my corporate Surface Pro 4 (i7, 16GB) with all of its corporate management software to my personal Surface Pro 4 (i5, 16GB) to see if that helped things.   Hmmm, viola!  MOST of the errors are gone, and much quicker (though still a bit sluggish).  

So my guess is the issue was some software firewall that our IT has on our machines that is not only inspecting the traffic (reasonably), but also may be modifying some of it (uggh).  

Has anyone else experienced issues such as this?  Are there any things to look out for, or recommendations I can push on our IT for resolving this? 

As well, I'll also open an Idea asking MS for a tool that might be able to diagnose issues like this.

[v-xida-msft]

Hi @Anonymous,

Could you please share a screenshot of the issue within your app?

Could you please show more details about the error message within your app?

I have made a test on my side and don't have the issue that you mentioned. 

Please check if your current running environment meets the minimum requirements for running a PowerApps app.

More details about the system requirements for running a PowerApps app, please check the following article:

System requirements for running an app

Best regards,

Kris

[Anonymous]

Kris,

Thanks for the response and your help.

Both machines are more than adequate for PowerApps - both Surface Pro 4s with 16 GB / 512 GB, one is i7 (company provided) and one is i5 (personal), connected via Ethernet to the same LAN with the same Internet connection (residential 100/10 connection that consistently gives over the 100/100 (usually around118 Mbs / 11.8 Mbps at 26 ms) via Speedtest.net - neither machine is connected to a VPN).  Note that if it matters - I'm on the East Coast US, and since our company is based on the west coast, I believe we're using the West Coast region PowerApps/Azure/Flow region - though again same for both machines.  

The point of the message was that at least in my case, it appeared that many of the issues I was experiencing may very well have been caused by something that our IT has running on my corporate machine (Surface Pro 4, i7, 16GB, 512GB SSD, Windows 10 Enterprise 1703 (15063.1155) - not necessarly to a specific PowerApps Studio issue.  

There wasn't any single issue or error, just a lot of random weird things going on - so screen shots I don't believe will help.  Some of the errors I've seen have been:

• Random errors flagged in apps that really don't have any - often simply clicking around in another area without making changes would flag errors in the code for apps that didn't really exist.  This may have been due to PowerApps interpreting (running) this code and perhaps accessing a data source in the backend that was having issues (due to firewall perhaps) - but this constantly happened.  Normally saving the app (without making any changes), closing PowerApps Studio, killing the browser tab and reloading and viola everything works again - at least for a while.
  
  
• Often keyboard would act funny, but only when the focus was within the PowerApps Studio.  Keyboard was fine in other apps, other tabs within the browser (Edge or Chrome), as well as in the address bar from the SAME tab that PowerApps Studio was running in (just within the actual content of the page did it act weird).  
  
  Symptoms here include it acting like there was a shift lock down when typing (not just caps) - typing numbers gave the shifted symbols, everything was in caps - no way to toggle off and on by using Shift, Caps Lock, etc.  Switching to anywhere outside of the PowerApps Studio window (another tab, the address bar of the same tab, another app, etc) and things were fine.  Only fix here was to exit out of PowerApps Studio (save and close the app), and reload (though usually just to be sure I'd at least kill the tab and start another.
  
  
• GUI issues in PowerApps Studio - Often times the PowerApps Studio would simply stop responding, or clicking on certain items in the interface would cause nothing to happen, where on other things it would work fine.  
  
  
• Partial data returned - Sometimes logic in the apps that returns data would only have some of the data sources return data at all, and in some cases only some of the records (with no changes to the data on the backend nor on the filters/queries).  BTW - I'm well versed enough at debugging to know this wasn't my app (at least in most cases!  :-))  This was just random.  
  
  
• etc - various other things that crop up time to time

So all of these point me to believe that there is something going on on the network side - most likely to software our corporate IT has installed. 

Everything works fine (other than known issues with PowerApps Studio) on my personal Surface Pro 4 on the same network.  Things work as I expect on the personal Surface.  

A bit of additional info - in all cases (work or personal Surface) I am using the latest versions of the browsers (Edge (on work Surface latest available for Win 10 1703, on personal, latest available for Win 10 1803), Chrome (latest 64 bit versions of each), and Firefox (latest 64 bit versions)).  For Chrome I've also done a total uninstall (cleaning directory and registry) and reinstall to make sure no lingering issues (though IT may very well push different settings for this - but I know that Firefox is not managed and I have the same issues there with work PC, and not with personal).  

So in summary, the only differences I see are related to Surface Pro (i7 vs i5, same RAM, same disk), Windows 10 version (1703 on company provided one, 1803 on personal), and IT management software on work one (some of which appears to try to hide itself so I probably don't have a complete list, but includes McAfee OfficeScan, Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit, and Druva InSync (though I ensure its not doing a backup at the time and actually pause it to delay the backups to outside of work hours).  

So these are the reasons I suspect this is some level of IT management software on the one machine causing issues.  

Purpose of my message was a heads up to others who may have been experiencing random issues like this as well - that it may not be caused by bugs in PowerApps as well as a request (I put in a feature request) for Microsoft in the future to provide some form of "network test tool" that attends to determine if there are any issues with the network etc that might cause problems with PowerApps Studio. 

As well as if Microsoft has any specific recommendations for IT departments (that I can forward to mine) regarding any configuration suggestions for some of the typical IT management software firewalls, etc - as well as any settings that might cause issues (ie: shoudl the MS servers be put in an exception list, etc)? 

I haven't yet submitted a formal support ticket on this as at the moment now that I have something that works and is usable (my personal machine) I need to get catch up with completing my app, though once that is done, I do intend to do so as I think MS can help diagnose.  I've also opened a ticket with our IT though I suspect this won't yield too many quick results unless we have some guidelines from MS. 

But again, primary reason for the note here was a heads up to others that may have similar odd issues with PowerApps Studio - that the issue MIGHT not be PowerApps Studio itself - but perhaps some IT managed applications.