Guide to network and system configuration for Slack huddles

With huddles, your team can have live audio or video conversations directly in your Slack workspace or Enterprise Grid organisation. Network, system or IT administrators can follow the checklists in this guide to ensure that your network and system are properly set up before your team starts using huddles, or to troubleshoot if you’re receiving reports of issues with huddles.  

Note: If you’re unable to follow these guidelines, we cannot guarantee optimal performance in huddles and may be limited in our ability to help resolve connectivity or performance issues.

Huddles network paths

• Approve *.chime.aws or IP range 99.77.128.0/18
• Allow traffic to and from UDP/22466 and TCP/443
  

Network configuration

• Unblock huddles network paths
  Blocking any required network paths will result in failed connections or severely degraded performance. Allow traffic to traverse network paths across all relevant network layers – firewalls, proxies, VPNs and Wi-Fi networks.
  
• Prioritise real-time huddles traffic
  Real-time audio, video and screen sharing are easily affected by network congestion and bandwidth limits. If you need to have a Quality of Service policy in place, ensure that traffic over huddles network paths is prioritised (or at the least, not deprioritised) by your policy’s rules.
  
• Allow huddles traffic to bypass VPNs
  VPNs often introduce latency, packet loss and jitter, resulting in a degraded experience with video huddles. Allow traffic over huddles network paths to bypass VPNs, clients and filters, or set up split tunnelling to allow direct routing of real-time traffic. For details on setting up split tunnelling, get in touch with your VPN provider.
• Allow huddles traffic to bypass proxies
  Proxies degrade real-time performance and may cause huddles features to fail unexpectedly. Allow traffic over all huddles network paths to bypass proxies and disable URL rewriting for huddles-related requests to minimise latency and preserve connectivity.
• Disable packet inspection and filtering
  Deep packet inspection or filtering can disrupt real-time media streams, introducing delays and connectivity issues during huddles. Disable all packet inspection and filtering for huddles network path traffic.
  
• Optimise huddles settings for VDI environments (recommended)
  Real-time performance in virtual desktop infrastructure environments is often poor due to additional latency and connectivity barriers. While we don’t suggest using huddles with a VDI, if your team needs to do so, they can switch to audio-only mode to minimise resource consumption and improve performance. You can also ask your VDI vendor if they offer a secure enterprise browser that can be installed on your users’ machines (as they typically bypass VDI-related routing and offload compute-intensive audio and video processing to local devices). 

System configuration

• Ensure media device access
  To work properly, huddles require access to users’ microphones, cameras and speakers, and for screen recording permissions to be enabled. Once you’ve made sure that all your users are able to grant Slack access to these tools from their devices, check that you’re not using third-party security or privacy tools that block or interfere with media device access or USB-connected media devices.
• Enable hardware acceleration
  Hardware acceleration ensures that video and screen-sharing streams are processed efficiently and reduces CPU usage. To maintain a high-quality huddles experience, confirm that hardware acceleration is enabled for all your users’ Slack applications and approved browsers.
• Support video codecs
  Huddles rely on AV1, VP9 and H.264 for media encoding and decoding. To ensure that these codecs are optimally supported, update your users’ devices and graphics drivers regularly.
• Quit Slack before automated updates
  Many features in Slack, including device access and audio playback, can be disrupted if Slack is partially updated while an older version is still running. If you run automatic updates for your users, configure any software update automation tools and processes to fully quit Slack before initiating an update (or prevent automatic updates from being applied until the user has quit Slack).
  
• Configure devices for high-performance modes (recommended)
  Power-saving settings can reduce system performance by throttling CPU or GPU, which can affect real-time audio and video quality during huddles. We recommend ensuring that your users’ devices are configured to use high-performance modes, and disabling any settings that throttle network or processing performance when devices aren’t connected to a power source. 

Still having trouble?

Get in touch with our Support team with the following information:

• Results that your team has shared from their audio, video and screen-sharing tests.
• Time stamps for any recent huddles that your team has experienced issues with.
• Screenshots or screen recordings showing errors or problems that your team is seeing.