Rise in Incidents

Cheryl Camacho

Hello, I have been seeing a lot of Incidents with Smartsheet over the last few months.  Is this something I should be concerned with?

J. Craig Williams

Cheryl,

 

It depends on how you mean the question.

The simple answer is yes, yes you should be concerned.

 

With any infrastructure system - a web based SaaS, your internal network, the electricity that keeps the lights on, you (or your system admin, IT manager, other responsible party) should be aware of the cost of having a problem with any part of that chain.

How much does a 2 hour power outage cost your company?

Someone should know.

 

At one site I visited, we had periodic server issues due to an old database server.

Every time resulted in 2-3 hours of downtime for 10-12 engineers (about $2000-$4000 per incident plus the cost of the techs trying to resolve the issue)

 

I don't have stats on how long the outages / incidents are but I do monitor them.

Here's the reported incidents for 2016 since I started tracking in late May:

 

 

I track them because I potentially lose* $500-$1000 per incident. 

That is mitigated by an alternative task list when I don't have access to:

1. Smartsheet
2. Internet

3. Computer

but still has to be watched.

 

*When I say lose, usually, that only means lost opportunity as the task is typically done, just at a later date.

 

If September (6) was normal, I would seek alternative solutiions.

If I worked for a larger company, that number may be too high for even an aberration.

 

Four of the last five months have 3 or more incidents. Reported incidents. I've personally submitted bug reports that did not get elevated to being reported on the status page, that caused me grief.

Some of those don't always impact me - if I'm not working with Reports and there is a problem there - not too big a deal, but potentially.

 

My suggestion to you would be to ensure your org knows the risk - impact and cost of anything like this. 

 

Craig

Shaine Greenwood

Hi All—

 

Although our downtime/incident record isn't perfect (no company's is), I believe Smartsheet is on the minimal side major incidents per year, and we're always working to improve.

 

Our downtime maintainence on December 10th was aimed at moving most of Smartsheet services over to a new, more attiquate server center to reduce the risk of incidents even more so, but as J. Craig thoroughly explained, it's good to evaluate the cost impact and have a backup plan in place. 

 

We do keep about a month's worth of incidents logged on our status page: http://status.smartsheet.com/

Shaine Greenwood

Our head of engineering, Andy Lientz, just made an announcement to address this: https://community.smartsheet.com/announcement/status-system-updates