Daily maintenance for multiple data pods

Question

Hey folks,

Looking for some advice/recommendation/best practice in relation to one of the status pages Symantec has for one of our products.

Essentially, this product has 30+ data pods (basically locations) that customers "connect" to. There is regular maintenance that occurs across all of the locations but the releases are staggered day by day, so 4 locations will be done day 1, 5 day 2 etc.

The team currently have posted one maintenance (here) and then updating this on a daily basis with the locations. However, the locations being updated are not clear and, well, the post is becoming too long to even read.

We were going to go down the path of one maintenance each day, but not sure if this would be the best way.

Any advice or suggestions is much appreciated!

Thanks,
Nick

Nick Coates · Answer

Hey Jake,

Many thanks for the advice! I'm not sure what the reason was for not going down the path to post one maintenance a day... I'll try and find out from the C3 team.

I'm going to go back to the team and suggest we do post a daily maintenance. Luckily, Statuspage provides the scheduling automation so will make it easier to set the maintenance to in progress/completed and the affected components to under maintenance without much manual intervention.

Thanks again!

Jake Bartlett · Answer

Hi Nick, great question here!

We were going to go down the path of one maintenance each day, but not sure if this would be the best way.

Curious what the reason was for not going down that path?

This is really the route I would suggest. It would require a bit more management on your end starting/ending maintenances but would keep each maintenance item shorter and thus easier to read. You could also use the "affected components" to list the components (pods) impacted by each individual maintenance, which would help make the locations impacted more clear.

Your current approach works ok, but as you mentioned the maintenance post is getting lengthy. The current approach also doesn't allow you to use the "affected components" element, since the affected components are constantly changing throughout the maintenance lifecycle.