When managing a system, the primary purpose is to keep your end users informed. When there are down times in your software, your audiences need to know about it. The people to let know about the problem are those that will blame you because of inconvenience and those expected to rectify the problem.
Without stressing too much on the matter, just let the inconvenienced know that you are doing something about it. You don’t have to go into details. Just let them know the duration they are expected to wait for the system to function normally. The matter needs to be held with a lot of professionalism. The crucial thing is to keep your customers informed.
The other audience is the person who will help you fix the problem. As soon as you notice abnormalities in the system, let these people know so that they can start working on it immediately. DevOps team needs to know the details of the technical hitch. While these people are working to resolve the problem, try as much as possible to minimize distractions. Strive to create an enabling environment for the problem to be solved quickly. To prevent financial damage, on your company and clients, encourage the rescue team to rectify the problem as faster as they can. As you continue updating your customers about the issue, do what it takes to speed up the recovery process.
Use of Application Performance Tools (APT)
These are tools used by your DevOps team to monitor performance of your application. The tools immediately notify the team when a hitch occurs on the system. According to statuscast.com the tools play a major part, in notifying the team before the issue becomes a problem to the end users. This will provide ample time to the team for investigation. Some of the ATP tools are predictive thus allows the team to solve the issue before it becomes a nuisance to clients.
Managing Application Uptime Using Hosted Pages
This page provides information about your application. Hosted status page helps serve your customers better in a natural way. The app prevents end users from experiencing downtimes and systems failure frustration. It shifts the burden of communication from the DevOps team to someone else. The team is, therefore, able to respond quickly.
Integration of your hosted status page and your APT will alert your customers at the same time as your recovery team. To prevent you APM from sending “force alerts” you can set your status page always to send the alerts after manual approval. This means you will decide on when to notify your end users in case of an issue.
To avoid frustrating you end users; you need to check your APT regularly to approval alerts of system failure. You can make your work easy by automating the program if you feel comfortable doing so. A hosted page should have a feature to translate messages. A technician from the DevOps team should guide the process. The function should allow you to send notifications which are not detailed to end users. Furthermore, your customers only need to know when the system will be up and running.
