Wherein steele tries to commit sepuku with an avaya phone.(venty and ranty)

[SteeleDragon78]

where to start....monday.

today started the new shift. not much earlier than the old one, but on a few hours of sleep it sucked.

The untested replacement

Today we received our new ticketing system. Digital Work flow 6.0.215. Friday they shut down the old dw at 5pm. we were using a fancied up java version of an access db for the manual process, worked ok. come Monday at 6am the let us into the new one. (for reference the old dw is gone, dead, reformatted and recommissioned) it was live for 2 and a half hours and died. frozen tickets, communication errors, complete disconnects. back to the manual process. manual is sloooooow. no auto populating fields, no phone numbers in the fields. gotta ask for everything. at 1030 dw comes back up. right before i went to lunch at 11 it died again. now each time it goes down the bosses crowed around a speaker phone and gripe. so this is the second time today they have to walk away from their danish and lattes. it came back up around 1. made it untill 240 before dieing again. this time it stays down till the can fix it.

would anyone like to know how long they beta tested this version? hmmm? cumon guess.......


they didnt.

no load test either.


there are 75 agents and sups that use it, not to mention the 2000 support group agents, and their managers. add to that my group and another airline group are a 10% minority of who got put on this today. the other airline only had 50 agents on it, with around 1000 support group agents.

they said that it would be seamless........

they lied.

so there was my monday, see ya tomarrow for untested replacement vol 2

[Geek King]

they said that it would be seamless........:

Major upgrades are never seemless. We just changed our DNS server* at work due to the old one starting to fail. Now, we know what we're doing, and planned this ahead of time for the switch over. We still had a few issues where there were special cases set up that we didn't know about. After a fixing the hiccups, things ran fine. We won't get into the people who outright ignored the instructions to reboot their computers, though. Then they call to whine that they can't get their internet and network drives to work.



*Part of networking computers. Quick & Dirty explanation: Helps tell the computers how to connect to remote computers. Important to everything that doesn't happen on your desktop PC.

[SteeleDragon78]

Major upgrades are never seemless. We just changed our DNS server* at work due to the old one starting to fail. Now, we know what we're doing, and planned this ahead of time for the switch over. We still had a few issues where there were special cases set up that we didn't know about. After a fixing the hiccups, things ran fine. We won't get into the people who outright ignored the instructions to reboot their computers, though. Then they call to whine that they can't get their internet and network drives to work.

but this wasnt supposed to be a major upgrade, this version has been in place for other leveraged clients for months!! we get on it and SPLAT. i didnt think my group could crash it quite this bad. i think the db we use helped cause the crash, the old version of dw looked like a bad vbasic project coupled with a HUGE access db. this one looks like a java version of the old one coupled with the same access db. i think the deployment of this version was poorly planed and implemented by people who dont really like their job. add to that the feeling of uncarring in this place. the warm fuzzies have fled. /tangent

so far today its been stable, kinda. no timeouts, but its been slower than the old one. perhaps they increased the citrix connections allowed to fix it. who knows.

[Stormraven]

It seems axiomatic that management and executives almost never understand why System and User Acceptance Testing is necessary - and that they'll almost always find out in the worst way possible.

Trouble is, they never learn from the experience.

[SteeleDragon78]

heres an interesting twists, today so far dw has been working fine. bout as slow as the old one. but just before lunch the phone system died. which killed all network connections. its back up, but im starting to get worried about the infrastructure around here. more as it develops

[SteeleDragon78]

so here is an update, got this in an email today.

Summary
To further improve server performance, ServiceCenter (SC) for Plano 100 will need a downtime maintenance window this evening to install additional memory to the SC application and database servers.
We apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for your continued patience.
Audience
All users using Service Center and Asset Center in the US Plano 100 instance of Digital Workflow.
Impact
ServiceCenter and DWWeb in US Plano 100 instance will be unavailable for up to 6 hours during the outage window.

dontcha love live smoke tests!!

[mattm04]

My college tried to make the whole campus wireless over the summer. The first e-mail sent to students was from IT "due to some unforeseen issues, the entire wireless network is down, including the old network in academic buildings until further notice." About a week later they got WiFi back in parts of academic buildings, it took a week and a half after that to get it all up and running.

[SteeleDragon78]

wow

so we were steady and stable for about 5 days. at 1130 it died. no warning, no latency just SPLAT. dunno when it will be back up, but it gets better, we had a sharepoint backup system for manual call recording.....thats down too. so now its paper unitll one of them is up. details when i getem



EDIT: total downtime 1.5 hrs, number of agents ready to jump out windows or beat the developers silly, 50. and me without a beer to watch...

[SteeleDragon78]

the drama continues

new email messages

We are currently running the ServiceCenter application on our failover server due to hardware issues with the primary server. Until the hardware issues are resolved, you may encounter slower system response than normal. We have engaged the vendor to address the hardware issues and will fail back to the primary once the hardware issues are corrected.

Affected items: ServiceCenter, DW.Web
Implementation Start: 10/17/2008 23:00 CDT
Implementation End: 10/18/2008 07:00 CDT
Summary
Downtime is schedule for this weekend for the US Plano 100 instance of DWNG ServiceCenter and DWWEB will be unavailable. Please note the following changes.

100-03-430302- ServiceCenter App Recycle
100-03-430315- Windows Server Reboots
Audience
All users using Service Center and Asset Center in the US Plano 100 instance of Digital Workflow.
Impact
ServiceCenter, AssetCenter, DWWEB, Reporting and ADHOC in US Plano 100 will be unavailable during the outage window.
Under normal circumstance, the system will be available at 12:00 AM Central Time. In case there are issues and backout is needed, the system will be available at 7:00 AM Central Time.
You can also check the following website for downtime changes scheduled for this week. Weekly Downtime Schedule

[Gravekeeper]

Oh god, Avaya. <shakes fists bitterly at the sky>

There are few words I dread hearing more. ><