Website / Self-serve Downtime management

[manuvarghese]

Hi, 

I am unsure if this is already proposed - but as a new customer of PM, i am slightly irked by the downtime of PM / Selfserve portals. 

We all know that downtimes are unavoidable but a better downtime management would help the users. 

Currently the website doesn't notify the user of a planned downtime (I couldn't find it) nor the temporary unavailable page shows estimated downtime and when will the service be up.  

Suggestions : 

1. Have downtime notifications in homepage as a marquee or a small banner atleast 3 days in advance so that user's will be able to plan ahead. 

2. Have downtime notification pushed to social media like Facebook & twitter ( I couldn't find a post in either of social media)

3. Revamp the downtime page by providing more information and including an estimated go live timer - something like "Sorry, we are busy gettings things sorted. Please try again in xx hours / mins"  

Any thoughts ?

[daredogg]

Hey @manuvarghese thanks for your idea. I have previously brought up some of your concerns. @Shazia_K usually puts up announcements a few days before planned maintenance, like in this previous post here. In this case, my understanding is that this recent maintenance was unplanned.

Since not everyone who uses PM as their carrier comes onto the community, I agree that there needs to be a banner showing up on the main website. Currently there's a banner asking for feedback. This is where I think planned maintenance should be better highlighted, linking to the actual announcement post.

As someone who's done IT work with websites, I can tell you that it's never precise that a website will be down for X many minutes. The best you can do is provide a "window", which is what PM already does.

Pushing the maintenance announcements to social media is a great idea... especially for unplanned maintenance! I think that's something that should happen.

[Juhi]

Completely agree; since PM users can't call customer service (not complaining), the self portal is the only way to interact with our account. An estimate of the length of the maintenance will greatly allay users' concerns.

[manuvarghese]

Hi @daredogg - i fully concur to your views except for the unplanned maintenance bit. The feedback banner is a great place to show the downtime announcements. And yes, I was also referring to a window say 2 hours but with a time ticker says - we will be back in 1 hour 15 mins after 45 mins of downtime.

From my limited knowledge about Web Development & Hosting - urgent & unplanned downtime is mostly if not always caused due to a production incident like accidental data leak, server outage, a wrong piece of code in live stream causing issues, DDOS, or any of those unpredicatble occassions 

In all these cases - the standard strategy is failover & revert to latest working stable code immeadiately and prepare for a planned maintenance later to fix the issue. Thus an unplanned downtime is usually in the order of minutes if not may be an hour. 

I am not so accurate of yesterday's downtime window - but it was approximately around 5.5 hours.

A 5 hr+ downtime on a critical service (IMHO SelfServe is a critical service for PM due to non availability of other account management / support options) can't be tagged as a minor maintenance especially without advanced notice.