No reported issues in February 2017 from our Pingdom tools.
Following performance issues with studentcentral on Wednesday, 18th January, between 2.30pm and 3.00pm Blackboard, our hosts for studentcentral, recommended some system downtime for maintenance.
We had scheduled this time for Friday, 20th January at 1am and would have communicated this downtime today. Blackboard, mistakenly, performed the maintenance this morning between 1am and 1.42am. Studentcentral would have been unavailable during this time.
Studentcentral appears to have had some performance issues between 2.30pm and 3.0pm on Wednesday 18th January, 2017
The issue appeared to have resolved itself by 3pm.
We have spoken to Blackboard, our managed hosting company, and they recommended an audit fix. They noted that all 4 application servers were showing high Java utilisation.
RESOLVED at 11:36 on Monday 5th December
Students submitting assignments via Turnitin have not been receiving email submission confirmation receipts since approximately 20:35 on 29/11/16. This issue has been reported to Turnitin and is under investigation currently.
Until this issue is resolved, we recommend that students take a screenshot of the on-screen digital receipt shown once an assignment has been submitted.
Students may also download a copy of their digital receipt by viewing the Turnitin submission point, clicking the “Download” icon next to their submission, and choosing the “Digital receipt” option from the menu shown:
Turnitin have advised us that they will be carrying out maintenance on the service on Saturday 3rd December, from 3-7pm. The service will be completely unavailable during this maintenance window (including the Turnitin for iPad app), and we therefore recommend avoiding scheduling submission deadlines to fall within this period.
So far this academic year there have been two brief interruptions to studentcentral:
To find out about services currently unavailable or planned upcoming services interruptions, check the IT Service Status webpage.
To find out about service interruptions and known issues with eLearning services, check this Service Status blog from the eLearning team.
We run Pingdom monitoring on our hosted services, studentcentral and studentfolio.
I’m going to add a monthly uptime update, and collate the data as the months go by. The ping times are filtered on Europe, 97% of our traffic is from the UK in term time, it will be interesting to monitor the spread over the Summer.
For May 2016 both Studentcentral and Studentfolio have had 100% uptime, which seems a good start, although I’m never convinced of 100% figures.
We need to get those ping times down.