Launching the DataCite Status Page

As a provider of crucial scholarly infrastructure, it is critical that DataCite not only provides a reliable service, but also properly communicates problems. The best way to do this is via a central status page, a best practice used by many organizations from Github and Diqus to Slack. Because you don't want to run the status page with the rest of your infrastructure (as the page may go down if there is a problem), many organizations use a third-party service.

Today DataCite is launching a status page for all its services at http://status.datacite.org. You can also reach the status page via the navigation menu in the upper right corner of recently launched DataCite services. Below is more information about the main features of the service.

Services status

At the top of the status page we provide an overview of the status of all our services.

We will update the status manually when there is an issue, possible values are

• Operational
• Degraded Performance
• Partial Outage
• Major Outage

The overall status at the top of the page reflects these changes.

Live system metrics

The DataCite status page shows the aggregated uptime for all DataCite services. The data are generated by sending an HTTP/HTTPS request to each service from different locations around the world every 30 sec (using Amazon AWS Route 53 Health Checks and aggregation of data in Librato).

Incidents

Incidents such as service downtime will be reported with incident status (Investigating|Identified|Monitoring|Resolved) and time. This information will remain available after incidents are resolved on an incident history page.

Scheduled maintenance

The status page will inform users about scheduled maintenance such as server upgrades requiring server downtime.

Notifications

Subscribing to updates via email, Twitter or RSS feed is the best way to stay informed about any issues affecting availability of DataCite services. You can do this by clicking on the Subscribe to Updates button:

All DataCite mailing lists will automatically be notified. Please contact us by email if you want to integrate the DataCite service status information via API into your own services.

Report a problem

If you encounter a problem with one of the DataCite services despite the status page not showing any issues, please report the problem by sending an email to DataCite Support. Please always use this email address to make it easier for us to keep track of problem reports.

This blog post was originally published on the DataCite Blog.