QuickConnect Dashboard: the Control Center
September 12th, 2007
Over the next few days, I will be diving into the different components that you can see in the Dashboard network diagram. The diagram gives our customers a real-time view into the status not only of their Connect instance, but also of the QuickConnect components that are monitoring and managing their Connect instance.
As the name suggests, the Control Center is a key part of the QuickConnect infrastracture. Working in conjunction with the Agent, it collects the reporting data that you see in the Dashboard (for example, new user sesssions per hour over the last 24 hours). It collects data from our remote monitoring sites, and tabulates it to identify any problems with internet access to your Connect instance. It is also responsible for keeping a list of past and future system events, such as maintenance windows and system upgrades.
In the unlikely event that your Connect instance becomes unavailable, the Control Center will know within at most 15 seconds. We get notified immediately, so we can take action, and you’ll also see the problem immediately within your Dashboard (Connect will turn red). The Control Center keeps tracks of all outages, so that you can go back after the fact to see exactly when they started and when they ended.
I want to emphasize again that our commitment is to ensure that your Connect instance stays up. But we are also committed to giving you detailed information when there is a problem. By far the most common scenario will be tracking actual downtime during scheduled maintenance. You may have scheduled system maintenance, for example, from 6pm to 8pm on Saturday evening. Because the Control Center keeps track of exactly when your Connect instance is unavailable, you will be able to see after the fact that the actual downtime during the scheduled maintenance was 6:45:10 through 6:52:15.
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