Emails about outages aren't right

Posting here rather than contacting support directly because this might be a universal problem.

Every few days I get an email about an outage that says that the outage has been Resolved. I have never gotten an email that tells me there is currently an outage. Huh??

I would really like to get emails that tell me when the system is down so that I can plan my time better. Even better if the email has an estimate in it.

Here is where you can go to see the status as well as sign up for notifications. It looks like you didnt want to contact support over this issue so i will move your post to the “everything else” section of the chat. if you make a post here in p&s it creates a support ticket.
https://statuspage.glowforge.com/

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I get emails announcing the problem and announcing that it has been fixed.

Apparently, I was not signed for notifications. I thought I was. But if I wasn’t signed up for notifications, I should have gotten no emails, not emails when a problem was resolved. Clearly a bug.

How were you able to move my post? I moved it back. I do want support to see it so they are aware of the bug. I posted here because I think it is unlikely I am the only person with this problem. Should have said “contacting support directly” (fixed).

My apologies about moving the post, was confused by the wording of your post.

Hope you get your issue sorted out.

Correction for Support. I actually don’t know if I was or was not previously signed up for subscriptions. I just did the thing to subscribe and the page still says “Subscribe for Updates.” So one of two things is true:

  1. Some people who are not signed up for updates get emails when an issue is resolved when they should get no emails.
  2. Some people who are signed up for updates only get emails when an issue is resolved but not when it occurs, but they should get both.

I should learn more with the next outage.

Also, either way, the status page gives no indication of whether you are or are not signed up for notifications.

I am signed up for alerts, but only receive emails when situations are resolved, so I’m in camp two.

It’s ok. I was able to move it back. But how could you move my post?

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Folks that have been forum members for a long time and have contributed much are eventually given additional privileges. Often you will see a tag next to their name that says Regular. Not everyone with those privileges, like myself, has decided to enable the tag.

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Is this a Discourse issue? (Support will not be able to help with those, in which case hearing from other customers in the Everything Else category is likely going to be your best bet.)

And there have been several Discourse (Forum related) issues in the last few days.

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Shouldn’t be anything to do with Discourse.

What @jbmanning5 said. The incorrect notifications have been happening for many months, and are not related to the forum. Looks like a bug in Glowforge’s notification system to me.

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I’m very sorry for the delayed response on this.

For many of the recent service issues posted to the status page, you have not, in fact, missed a notification that an outage is occurring. For service interruptions that are exceptionally brief or degraded service issues that affect an exceptionally low percentage of units, the issue may fall beneath the threshold to required to generate a notification before the outage is resolved. (As an example, one of the recent service issues was resolved within 4 minutes and only affected units attempting to connect during that 4 minute period.)

We have, however, recently changed our process to manually update the status page to capture these events, even if they fall beneath the threshold to generate a notification. For system issues with larger impact, you will typically receive notifications when the outage occurs along with updates as we work to resolve the issue.

If you are subscribed to status updates and you are not receiving any notifications from the status page, please send an email to support@glowforge.com so we can investigate. If, however, you are receiving an “issue resolved” notification without receiving an “issue started” notification, the most likely reason is because the issue fell beneath the threshold to generate an “issue started” notification.

Note, there is one recent post on the status page for an extended service issue that strictly speaking wasn’t an outage, however, because resolving the issue required a service interruption, we posted an update to the status page the day we performed maintenance to resolve the issue. You can find that incident here: https://statuspage.glowforge.com/incidents/twcct7v40c4f.

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Thanks for replying, Jae. This is not a recent problem. As far as I know, I have never received a notification that an outage was occurring in the entire time I’ve had a Glowforge. I have gotten plenty of notices that outages were resolved.

There is no way to know if I was previously actually subscribed to notifications. What I know is:

  1. I have only received notifications of the ends of outages, not the beginning. Was it the case that every issue in the last few years was below the threshold you mention?
  2. When I went to the status page (linked above), there was no indication as to whether or not I was subscribed, so I clicked the button to subscribe. There is still no indication as to whether or not I am subscribed.
  3. Since doing (2) on 11/25 at 3:51 PM, I have not received any notifications at all, so I do not know if there have been any outages in the last 3 days. If there were, I didn’t get notified at either end.

So I still think one or both of these two things is true:

  1. Some people who are not signed up for updates get emails when an issue is resolved when they should get no emails.
  2. Some people who are signed up for updates only get emails when an issue is resolved but not when it occurs, but they should get both.
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Something is still wrong. On December 5th, I got three emails that made me think things were ok.

7:50 AM App.glowforge.com down
New incident: Investigating

I also got an email at 8:22 AM from my own email address that repeated this

8:25 AM App.glowforge.com down
Incident status: Monitoring

8:57 AM App.glowforge.com down
Incident resolved

Then this morning I go these three emails from my own email address:

8:53 AM app.glowforge.com load errors 12/15/2019, 12:26pm PST - 12:37pm PST
Resolved - Starting at 12/15/2019 at 12:26m PST, the Glowforge App was disrupted. A “The website is under heavy load” error message may have been encountered when trying to access the site. The issue was resolved at 12:37pm PST.

8:53 AM app.glowforge.com load errors 12/15/2019, 3:06pm PST - 3:11pm PST
Resolved - Starting at 12/15/2019 at 3:06pm PST, the Glowforge App was disrupted. A “The website is under heavy load” error message may have been encountered when trying to access the site. The issue was resolved at 3:11pm PST.

8:53 AM app.glowforge.com service degradation 12/16/2019, 5:05pm PST - 5:20pm PST
Resolved - Starting 12/16/2019 at 5:05pm PST, users may have experienced some elevated latency when trying to access app.glowforge.com. The issue was resolved at 5:20pm PST.

I never received an email about these problems. If they weren’t important enough or not relevant to me, why is Glowforge emailing me about them when they are resolved? This makes no sense.

Additionally, Glowforge should NEVER send email messages, even to me, from my email address! This is a bad, bad practice!

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