Bug: Reports still have problems

J. Craig Williams

Smartsheet status (https://status.smartsheet.com/) shows the Reporting Service Delay issue as

"Monitoring - The Reporting service is no longer experiencing delays. We are continuing to monitor this service."

Sorry to say, I still see issues.

This has been going on for a while:

"Report Delays" - 2018-03-14 and 2018-07-12

"Report Degradation" - 2018-06-14 and 2018-06-21

"Reporting Service Degradation" - 2018-07-16, 2018-07-17, and the current 2018-07-25

These may not all be the same issue, nor likely is this list complete as there are vague "Smartsheet Application"' reports as well and these are only the ones that have been posted to the Status page.

Today I was testing daisy chaining cell links.

Sheet 1 >links to> Sheet 2 >links to>multiple sheets.

I built a Report to show one line (the linked line) from each sheet.

In the tests below, opening the 'offending' sheet showed it was correctly linked.

First test was 10 multiple sheets. One of the 10 sheets did not update immediately after a change, but did with the second refresh.

I expanded the test

Sheet 1 >links to> Sheet 2 >links to>multiple sheets.

                              Sheet 2 >links to> Sheet 3 >links to>multiple sheets.

One or two of the next hierarchy would occasionally fail to update. Initial testing appeared to always be the same ones, but further testing disproves that. This would require several minutes before a Report refresh would update properly. 

I expanded the daisy chain again and had one example where it took nearly 30 minutes before all rows updated properly. This is during a period when my only Smartsheet related activity was to refresh the Report every few minutes.

The images below shows where I am now

The first shows the cell linking scheme. The second shows the current test failure (it has been 10 minutes since [CC] was changed from "R" to "QRTS")

This is the Report.

https://app.smartsheet.com/b/publish?EQBCT=8ed145c6b2df4858a39470924f1ba0b5

My testing is:

Change something in one or more of the first Report row (sheet PI) and then save/refresh to see the results. If the sheet has been one to not be shown properly, I change the [Primary] column to ">> from PI" to ">> from PI **". The list of sheets that have failed to be shown properly continues to grow.

I will resubmit this directly to support@smartsheet.com, I just did not want to type it twice.

Craig

 

 

 

Mike L.

I was asked to show what I have been doing in smartsheet for the past couple of months to a supervisor  All of my reports were non-responsive.  There was a bit of eye rolling then their attention seemed to divert to emails and other business. It is hard to get support for something that you know is good if you can't show what it does.  I know all systems have problems but this does make me concerned. 

J. Craig Williams

Update: 2018-07-29 09:05 EDT

Status says "All Systems Operational"

Testing results worse than yesterday. Again all green background cells are all links to the first row's data.

Update: 2018-07-29 9:20 EDT

See 2nd image

J. Craig Williams

Update: 2018-07-29 20:43 EDT

I continued to periodically test using the above Sheets and Report.

Until about 5pm EDT, I continued to see problems, still as long as 30 minutes to update the Report properly. 

The last three testing periods (a few minutes every hour or so) have been satisfactory. It may be due to the lateness of the day on a Sunday. I'll post again if anything changes.

 

J. Craig Williams

Well, that didn't take long. See column [CD]. It refreshed after 5 minutes, but that is likely not acceptable for many users.

The symptom is back, but I'm more concerned with the other behavior I am seeing, new post to be written.

Stefan 7k

Hi Craig,

count me in. I experience the same "Degradation of support" ;-) in the past 12 months (Team and Enterprise).

I really hope they do something substantial here!

Greetings

Stefan

Paul Newcome

I got this Friday evening. I haven't had a chance to get into my reports to see if they are still running slow yet this morning, but we shall see. I too had the situation of being asked to give a "demo" (the company I work for is still in the "Smartsheet testing" phase to see if they like it), and none of my reports were working.

 

"Hi Paul,

The engineering team, as well as the executives here at Smartsheet, are aware of the performance issues you have faced while using our platform recently. We understand the frustration this is causing, and want to share some background on what has been occurring.

To support the growth of our business, we have been investing to expand the capacity of the Smartsheet platform. Over the last few weeks, we have been upgrading and adding processing capacity to our core services. Unfortunately, as part of this process, we have experienced performance degradations as we tune how our higher performance services work together. Customers may have experienced two related issues: ongoing delays in updating reports, and on July 25, intermittent performance issues affecting Smartsheet as a whole, resulting in slower load times for sheets and reports, and diminished overall performance. We understand that you rely on Smartsheet to be up-to-date and accurate at all times, and we take our responsibility to our customers very seriously. Over the last 24 hours, we have implemented a number of changes to address these issues and will continue to work to optimize the performance of our platform to meet the high expectations of our customers.

For up-to-date information about Smartsheet status, please visit https://status.smartsheet.com.

Thank you for your continued business.

Robert

 

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VP of Technical Operations

E: robert.pierson@smartsheet.com

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J. Craig Williams

Update: 2018-07-30 11:11 EDT

First failure. Did not refresh all items on first refresh after a save, but did on the second one after about 15 seconds.

Craig

J. Craig Williams

Update: 2018-08-02 10:10 EDT

I have not worked with Reports much in the past 3 days ... but for those I have, I have not noticed any lags.

Craig