Enterprise WebRTC Diagnostics Collector

WebRTC failures often depend on conditions outside the application: VPN routing, proxies, DNS, TLS inspection, endpoint security, firewall policy, or the active network adapter. Walking a customer through each check is slow, inconsistent, and prone to missing the one difference that matters.

I mapped the questions I ask during real escalations into a customer-runnable collector. I defined the evidence to capture, the privacy boundary, the failure behavior, the summary format, and the handoff into the existing support workflow.

• ScreenMeet evidence: copies product logs with locked-file-tolerant handling and opens the official WebRTC test.
• Network path: captures adapters, IP configuration, routes, default routes, DNS settings, and active TCP connections.
• Enterprise controls: records WinHTTP, user proxy and PAC settings, firewall profiles, TCP 443 reachability, and presented TLS certificates.
• Fast triage: filters processes, services, and installed software for likely VPN and security products, then surfaces findings in 00-Summary.txt.

The collector is intentionally diagnostic rather than invasive. It excludes browser history, cookies, credentials, Wi-Fi passwords, arbitrary documents, private keys, broad event logs, and packet captures. It collects only targeted proxy environment variables and avoids dumping full firewall policy.

Individual checks fail gracefully so an unsupported Windows command or a locked log file does not prevent the rest of the archive from being created. Temporary staging data is removed after successful compression.

The first version exposed a PowerShell 5.1 parser error in a process-collection block: inline try/catch expressions were invalid inside a custom-object property assignment. The later brace and parenthesis errors were cascades from that first parse failure.

I isolated the earliest actionable error, moved defensive property access into compatible statements, and kept the collector’s best-effort behavior. The lesson was practical: syntax that appears reasonable still needs validation against the oldest runtime customers will actually use.

Operational impact: replaces repeated back-and-forth with a consistent evidence package, gives the engineer a prioritized summary, and makes affected-versus-unaffected endpoint comparisons possible.

Technical depth: PowerShell, Windows networking, DNS, routing, proxies, TLS certificates, endpoint-security discovery, structured exports, and resilient file handling.

Product judgment: preserving the official WebRTC test instead of treating a successful TCP check as proof of media connectivity, while keeping the customer experience simple enough for a support case.