How to communicate a service outage?
I am helping a customer investigate ways to communicate a planned or unplanned service outage.
Before a planned outage, I have identified these ways to alert users ahead of time: 1. E-mail notifications 2. A "message of the day" can be placed in a banner on top of the CLM web ui screen http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSYMRC_5.0.2/com.ibm.jazz.repository.web.admin.doc/topics/c_configuring_themes.html One possibility that arises here, is to use Javascript to display a popup window, but then users may find this disruptive or annoying. 3. For team dashboards, a "News" or "HTML" widget can contain information about an upcoming outage. 4. Client organizations may have additional ways to disperse information such as RSS clients in Windows. For a partial outage, whether planned or unplanned, the above methods can communicate if for example one out of multiple applications is down. During a planned or unplanned outage, I have identified these ways to alert users: 1. An IHS reverse proxy can re-direct users to a page with outage information and next actions. This solution should work: http://www.shellhacks.com/en/Redirect-Site-to-Maintenance-Page-using-Apache-and-HTAccess Note 1: If there are mixed clients, Eclipse and web users, it is important to issue a status 503 from this page so the Eclipse client will detect an outage. But is there a way to display a plain-text message to Eclipse users in this scenario? Note 2: Re-directing ALL requests may not be a good idea as this may hinder troubleshooting or repair. So one could modify the rewrite rules in the above article to exclude any server internal invocations or requests from addresses used by server admins. Note 3: Involving IHS in outage reporting makes sense if errors generally happen behind IHS (which is most often the case for my customer). 2. DNS may be used to direct users to a different IHS displaying an error message but then there would be certificate problems if SSL is used. 3. E-mail notifications 4. Client organizations may have additional ways to disperse information such as RSS clients in Windows. What else is there? |
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Comments
A few comments.
1. The linked example is returning HTTP 503 - exactly what you want.
2. If you can use HTTP_USER_AGENT HTTP header to identify the client type (Eclipse or Browser), you can create different rules to respond accordingly.
3. If you use the same SSL certificate on the alternative IHS server (re:DNS redirect), there should be no problems, as the certificate matches the FQDN in the URL, not the server itself.