Standard practice for maintenance windows?

[SkyeHa]

Workfront has some maintenance windows (as listed on the trust site) and the language around it is basically " We infrequently schedule maintenance in the windows listed above. If down time is necessary, it will be scheduled in the corresponding window and announced on this page." How do you handle this in your company? Do you basically tell people not to work during any of the maintenance windows just in case? Or is someone pinging the trust site the day before, trying to figure out if maintenance was scheduled for the following evening? -skye

[EXP_-_DustinMa]

Hey Skye, Have you thought about subscribing to the Trust site so you get notified when we plan to do maintenance? You can call into support and confirm the cluster you're on so you can subscribe for the correct cluster for your instance. Just a thought. Thanks! Dustin Martin Assigned Support Engineer Workfront

[SkyeHa]

thanks Dustin! Can you confirm what the subscriptions do? For example, I am subscribed to my cluster for "Workfront Status" -- is this the method where they would send out maintenance alerts? Because so far, the only email I got related to Saturday night's maintenance arrived an hour before the maintenance, and was a "reminder". I subscribe through my company address and a gmail address because sometimes we have delivery issues, and still no joy: only ever got 2 emails: one at 6 to "remind" and one at 7 to say they were starting. I've also subscribed for the API alert, fusion, and proof. -skye

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi Skye, Although thankfully not as often these days, for times when we do have heavy weekend work and every minute counts, I discovered "https://uptimerobot.com">Uptime Robot many years ago, which alerts me via email whenever a website (e.g. www.atappstore.com, atappstore.my.workfront.com, or eachOfOurClientsDomains.my.workfront.com) goes down and comes back up. Super handy, and I encourage you to try it out. Back in the AtTask days (oh, you know who you are, and I want to shake your hand at LEAP next week about this one!).... During an outage, we'd leave the login page up and listen to the royalty-free equivalent of Girl From Ipanema, until it stopped, which was our cue that it was safe to resume our work. Regards, Doug Doug Den Hoed - AtAppStore Got Skills? Lend a hand! https://community.workfront.com/participate/unanswered-threads

[SkyeHa]

hey Doug, yep, Uptime Robot was suggested at one time (a previous employer's IT team did say not to use it because it was equivalent to a DDOS, which ... well, everything's subjective so I'll leave that up to the reader). Keep in mind, I'm not really asking about sudden takedowns, but scheduled maintenance. If the trust site announces on Friday afternoon that there will be a scheduled takedown on Saturday night, I get that they have some sort of policy to not email that kind of stuff out, and wonder what other folks do to mitigate for it. (if anything) For us, we eventually decided to pin a post with the maintenance schedule and we promised to let folks know if we knew ahead of time, but basically on Thursdays and Saturdays they shouldn't plan to put in any overtime. -skye

[EXP_-_DustinMa]

Hey Skye, We send out announcements in advance, but we also do send out subscription emails for maintenance. The subscriptions for Trust are meant to notify you of any immediate planned maintenance, as well as any service disruptions. Here's an example of a recent one: http://drop.workfront.com/cdb59cdb8d87 I hope this info helps! Thanks, Dustin Martin Assigned Support Engineer Workfront

[SkyeHa]

hey @Dustin Martin , thanks, that's what I thought, and that's the one I got. It came in an hour before the scheduled maintenance, but the trust site had posted about it over a day before the maintenance. It feels like that initial announcement (Friday) never got to the subscription list. It's not helpful to hear about it an hour before it happens -- not all our users subscribe to Trust and we wouldn't be able to reach them to warn them if we weren't checking office email. -skye

[EXP_-_DustinMa]

Hey Skye, I checked with our network ops team, and typically we try and send out email notifications about 72 hours in advanced of scheduled maintenance. We've recently had to perform maintenance in a quicker manner, and haven't always had the chance to send out an advanced notification about it. I still recommend subscribing to the Trust site, and I'd recommend checking it the day before if you plan on working off-hours (during our scheduled maintenance windows for example.) Thanks! Dustin Martin Assigned Support Engineer Workfront