Video Transcript (English)

Hello! In this video, you’ll learn how to troubleshoot common connection errors when using the C# MongoDB driver, such as: Network access errors and User authentication errors.

Connection errors can cause a lot of frustration for developers. With this video, we hope to minimize that frustration by giving you a foundation to troubleshoot connection problems with MongoDB.

Before we begin, it’s important to remember that it’s common to experience connectivity issues when learning something new like MongoDB. Connectivity issues may stem from systems put in place to protect our database. MongoDB has a lot of resources to help you understand and address these issues.

Let’s get started by opening a C# console app that already has the MongoDB driver set up. We’re opening it in Visual Studio 2022 on Windows. If you're using a different OS, an IDE, or a text editor, the experience will be slightly different, but the code will be the same.

This application creates a MongoClient by using a connection string that we retrieved from the Atlas dashboard.

Once it’s connected to Atlas, it retrieves a list of the databases on the cluster.

Finally, it loops through the list of databases and logs each one in the console.

Now let’s run and build the solution to see what happens.

It seems to be taking a while to connect…

We finally receive an error message.

The message tells us that our connection has timed out while trying to connect to the cluster.

This might occur because our IP address has not been granted network access to the Atlas cluster. By default, your Atlas cluster has NO access to the outside world. You’ll need to enable this in the Atlas UI.

To confirm this, go to the Atlas dashboard for the cluster and click the Network Access tab.

It looks like our IP address is not on the IP Access List, so we need to add it.

Click the “Add IP Address” button.

In this window, we’ll give an IP address access to our Atlas cluster. We can either type in an IP address or use one of these two buttons, “Add Current IP Address” or “Allow Access From Anywhere.”

We can add our current IP address or open our cluster to any IP address.

If you decide to open connections from anywhere, be aware that this poses a security risk..

In our case, we’ll add our current IP address.

Now let’s confirm the changes!

Note that the changes take about 30 seconds to deploy to our cluster.

Now that we have updated our network access, let's run our solution again.

First, we’ll clear the timeout error from the previous build.

Then, we’ll open the application and run the build.

Hmm… it appears that we have an authentication error. You might want to pause the video for a moment and see if you can find the problem.

The problem is that we didn’t update our password in the connection string. MongoDB does not autofill the password portion of your connection string. This ensures that your data is protected.

So, let’s update the password and then check if we can connect. We’ll experience an authentication error if any part of our connection string is misspelled.

Everything appears to be correct, so let’s run the build again.

Now we have successfully connected without any errors, and all of our databases have been logged.

Awesome job! We didn’t cover every type of connection issue in this video, but you now have the tools to identify and troubleshoot two of the most common connection errors.

To summarize, here’s what you learned how to troubleshoot in this video:

To fix a network access error, use the Atlas UI to add your IP address to the Network Access tab.

To fix an authentication error, ensure that the connection string has the correct password. For security reasons, MongoDB doesn’t auto-populate the password field when we copy the connection string from Atlas.