what could cause “server error” or “Your network connection may have been lost or Splunk may be down" “ when trying to load MS Azure Import Identity Provider (IdP) metadata

[jbarlow_splunk]

When attempting to load the idp federation meta data,
encounter either “server error” or “Your network connection may have been lost or Splunk may be down"

[jbarlow_splunk · Accepted solution]

These errors indicate an error in the requests between browser and splunkd
specifically when calling

splunkd/__raw/services/admin/SAML-idp-metadata

to be able to debug this , need to use either a http tracing tool , or network trace
to see either response errors or network errors

On Chrome , for example, can use - Chrome DevTools

Select More Tools > Developer Tools from the Chrome Menu.
Right-click on a page element and select Inspect

Then view the network panel , and look at the responses

One example cause , could be with nginx reverse proxy with default settings
and following response seen :

414 Request-URI Too Large
nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

In that case resolution http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#large_client_header_buffers