Within the next month or two, we’ll be re-launching OpenSRS Status with a new look and a bit of a different way of doing things.
Since we launched the site in 2008, our aim with OpenSRS Status has been to provide a one-stop site offering real-time information about the status of the various systems and services that our resellers rely on. Having a real-time status site wasn’t common back in 2008 and the transparency around our services was (and continues to be) something that sets us apart from our competitors and other Internet service providers.
The new OpenSRS Status site will be found at the same address as the current site – http://opensrsstatus.com. OpenSRS Status will continue to be completely off-network so it stays online even if catastrophe strikes our network infrastructure.
What’s new
Once the new site launches (planned for early July), you’ll notice a cleaner look-and-feel, along with improvements to how incidents are displayed. Here are some of the new features:
- A new, simplified dashboard – only open or recently resolved incidents are shown, along with any maintenance that is currently underway. You’ll be able to tell at a glance whether everything is working well, or whether there’s something happening that you need to know about. Incidents will stay up on the homepage for three days after the incident is resolved and will be archived (but still viewable) after that for reference.
- More descriptive post titles – we’ve done away with the ‘online’, ‘degraded’ and ‘offline’ post titles. Instead, you’ll see that an incident is either ‘open’ or ‘resolved’ and post titles will provide specific information about what the impact is. For example, instead of “Email Cluster A is Degraded”, it will be “Intermittent issues with logging in for some users on Email Cluster A”. Better information, at a glance.
- A single page and URL per incident – any updates on an incident will show up on the same page as the original incident post. You can check on the status of any open or resolved incident (including viewing any time-stamped updates) at one permanent URL. This makes it easier for you to track an incident from start to finish.
- Better/simpler categorization of TLDs services – with hundreds of TLDs and more on the way, we’re categorizing them – gTLDs in one group, and ccTLDs grouped geographically by continent, instead of breaking each TLD out separately.
Less noise
We also took a look at some of the things we’ve done with OpenSRS Status since 2008 with an eye towards simplifying things to remove some of the noise.
With that in mind, we’ve decided to stop posting real-time registry maintenance notices. We’ll continue to provide advance notice of any planned registry maintenance in the Help & Support Portal and you’ll note that we’ve added a Google Calendar version complete with the ability to subscribe via .ics starting today. Note: we’re waiting on a settings change to take effect to make that calendar fully public.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of these maintenance windows are transparent to resellers and users thanks to OpenSRS’ queuing mechanisms that queue orders when registries are offline or in maintenance and process them once the systems reconnect.
Also, note that we’ll continue to provide real-time notifications for maintenance that impacts our own systems and for maintenance planned by our Trust Service partners and goMobi that sometimes do have an impact during the maintenance period.
Changes to notification options
Back when we launched the first OpenSRS Status site in 2008, posting updates to Twitter was an experimental feature. Twitter itself was pretty new, but even back then we suspected that a lot of resellers would want to get status information that way. Today well over 500 followers are getting real-time updates via Twitter and the use of Twitter for this type of application is common. With the new site, @OpenSRSStatus on Twitter becomes the preferred notification method.
Once the new site launches, email subscriptions for OpenSRS Status will no longer be provided. We know some resellers view email as the preferred method of receiving notifications but the current system used to subscribe and send emails isn’t up to the task anymore. In fact, as we’ve added new services and TLDs over the last couple of years, there hasn’t been a way to subscribe to or send out email notifications.
We looked at building out a new system or working with a third-party solution to handle subscriptions and sending of email notifications. In the end, no suitable option was found and we couldn’t make a case for allocating the resources to build and maintain what is a fairly complex system that not many resellers were making use of.
We’ll continue to provide full RSS feeds (both a master feed of all services and individual feeds for service categories).
Other notification options
For those resellers who want email notifications, we suggest either setting up an RSS-to-email script on your own infrastructure, or you can use a service like IFTTT.com or Zapier.com which can take an RSS feed and parse it into an email that can be sent to the address of your choice. IFTTT.com can take any RSS feed and do a myriad of different things with it – send an SMS or an email, or even call you on the phone.
You might also consider using Twitter’s built-in SMS or push notifications as a solution to provide real-time updates.
Launching in July
We’re planning to cut over to the new status site in early July. We’ll let you know the exact date a week or two in advance and we’ll provide a list of the RSS feeds prior to the cutover so you can pre-configure any RSS feed readers or scripts prior to the re-launch.
Email notifications for status events will continue to work until the cutover to the new site, at which point they will no longer be sent.
In advance of the cutover to the new site, starting June 1, 2013, we’ll no longer provide real-time notifications for registry maintenance via the current site. You can view all upcoming registry maintenance windows at the Help & Support Portal including the new calendar view and .ICS subscription option. We post them as soon as we get notice from our registry and other service partners.