Enter credentials & test connectivity
Most channels need credentials — an API key, storage keys, or a username and password — to reach an external system. DASH stores these securely and lets you check a channel is working before you rely on it. This page covers entering credentials, testing connectivity, and activating or pausing a channel.
1. Enter credentials
Section titled “1. Enter credentials”When you add or edit a channel, fill in the configuration and credential fields for its kind — for example an S3 bucket with access key and secret, or a Veeva Vault URL, username and password.
2. Update credentials without re-typing secrets
Section titled “2. Update credentials without re-typing secrets”Once saved, secret values are masked and shown as ••••••••. When you edit a channel later:
- Leave the masked placeholder as it is to keep the stored secret unchanged. A partial edit — for example renaming the channel — does not clear your credentials.
- Type a new value over the placeholder only when you actually want to replace the secret.
3. Test the channel
Section titled “3. Test the channel”You can test any channel on demand to check reachability and credentials. The result is recorded on the channel as a status — not tested, pass, fail, or not applicable — with a timestamp and a readable message. What the test does depends on the kind:
| Channel kind | What the test checks |
|---|---|
| DASH Manual | Always passes — “Built-in / internal channel”. |
| Not applicable — email has no endpoint to probe. | |
| API | Endpoint reachability — any HTTP response counts as reachable. A DNS, connection or timeout failure is a fail. |
| Storage | The backend — for example an S3 bucket reachability probe, Veeva Vault authentication, or a SharePoint site and library check. Missing or invalid credentials fail. |
| Source | Lists a small sample of documents — “Connected (n sample(s) found)”. |
For a source channel, the equivalent of a test is fetching a sample and running a dry-run poll, which previews the certificates it would create without going live. See Run a dry-run.
4. Activate or pause a channel
Section titled “4. Activate or pause a channel”Each channel has an active flag you can toggle independently of everything else:
- An inactive submission or storage channel is skipped by the submission pipeline.
- A source channel can be paused to stop scheduled polling, and resumed later. Resuming clears its failure count and returns it to active — but a source channel cannot be resumed unless a definition map is pinned. See Configure polling.