Troubleshooting ThoughtFarmer EDC service issues

The ThoughtFarmer Employee Directory Connector (EDC) Service runs alongside your primary ThoughtFarmer web application to manage Active Directory authentication and account synchronization workflows.

This troubleshooting guide applies exclusively to self-hosted/on-premise installations utilizing an on-premise Active Directory instance as an external user store.

Cloud Identity Providers (such as Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, and Google Workspace) utilize built-in, cloud-native synchronization services. If you encounter synchronization issues with a Cloud IdP, please submit a ticket directly to the ThoughtFarmer Helpdesk for support.

Identifying service stalls and failures

If the ThoughtFarmer EDC Service encounters an unhandled exception or enters a halted state, automated Active Directory synchronization tasks (both scheduled background syncs and manual, on-demand requests) will cease processing.

When this occurs, the following alert will appear at the top of the Admin Panel:

"There are stale messages in the task queue tables. Please check that the ThoughtFarmer EDC service is running on the web server."

 

Verifying service health and task thresholds

To diagnose the service state on your application host server:

1. Log in to the web server hosting ThoughtFarmer and open Windows Services (services.msc or via Start > Administrative Tools > Services).

2. Locate the ThoughtFarmer EDC Service and verify whether its status is marked as Running.

3. If the service is running but tasks remain unfulfilled, return to the ThoughtFarmer web application and navigate to Admin panel > Advanced > Task queue.

4. Inspect the timestamps under the Run date column.

   • The global error alert triggers when a task's execution delay exceeds the threshold defined by the messageQueue.stale.Message.Minutes configuration setting (default: 90 minutes).

   • Long-running operations—such as full Active Directory synchronization cycles, site-wide search reindexing, or document text extraction—can legitimately require up to 60 minutes to complete under heavy load.

   • If routine queue items remain in a pending state significantly longer than 60 minutes, the service is stalled and requires intervention.

For detailed task queue diagnostic paths, see our self-service article: There are stale tasks in the task queue 

Restarting a stalled or failed service

By default, the ThoughtFarmer EDC Service is configured to restart automatically following a process crash. A manual service restart is typically only necessary if the process enters a hung/stalled state or following an administrative configuration change.

Before manually restarting the EDC service, evaluate your total task backlog in the Task queue dashboard. You should consider clearing/purging the queue prior to restarting the service if:

• The EDC service has been offline or stalled for several days.

• The task queue contains several thousand accumulated messages.

Restart procedure

• Log in to the application web server as an administrator.

• Launch Windows Services (Start > Administrative Tools > Services).

• Locate and select ThoughtFarmer EDC Service from the service list.

• Click Restart the service (or Start the service if the process has stopped).

• Navigate to Admin panel > Advanced > Task queue to confirm that task processing has resumed. Refresh the page periodically to verify that pending messages are systematically clearing from the queue.

Escalating to support

If the EDC service fails to restart, continues to stall, or encounters persistent processing errors after a restart, please compile your local system logs (Admin panel > Logs & statistics > System logs) and open a ticket with the ThoughtFarmer Helpdesk for engineering review.