I have a feature request… I think its been requested before, but I’ll try again. I sense that the software side of the house is still in beta. In fact it feels a bit more like alpha. When I bought my Glowforge on day 7, I knew it was risky and I knew I was dealing with a startup that might give spotty service. That was ok with me. And I’ve waited patiently just like everybody else. In fact, I think that the average Glowforger is pretty patient. Though with the tremendous outpouring of purchasers, I was hoping that problems that could be solved by throwing money at them (like programing) would get solved quickly. Hmmmm… But Glowforgers are still of the mindset that this is a group project, and us early purchasers are really beta testers.
With that in mind, there are some things that Glowforge could do to make our lives easier. It would be great if there were some scripts running on the servers (I’m guessing that they are already there) that could give us some usage statistics and error statistics. A regular system status report. It would give us an idea if we are having a problem with our individual machines, or if the problems are server side. Right now, we don’t have a clue. And I really don’t want to sit around trying every iteration of what could be causing the problem if the problem is just a glitch in the server. Even if there were days where the scripts were showing things mainly not working, it would be so much nicer if we didn’t have to wonder if it was something we did, or something that just can’t be fixed at the moment.
Also, when our machines go into calibration, is it really our machines? Or something in the server? I’m sure there are some pretty interesting statistics that we could look at that would make us all feel a little better.
Please please please. You’ll need to do this eventually. Everybody needs to do this eventually. It doen’t even take much: register a hosting account with another company than the one you use for your app or main web site and put up a static page. Give a few people who are authorized and trained on your communications policies access to update the content. Put up a big page that says “All systems are working correctly.” When you have an incident, wake up one of these people who gets to decide whether it’s serious or large enough to go to wordpress or whatever and change the page to say “We are investigating reports of connectivity issues. We will post an update by 9:00.”
This is not the kind of thing that requires stopping development for, and having it set up and the procedure documented now means that when the inevitable 2-day-long outage comes, you’ve got at least one small part of your incident response prepared.
I’d take off my SRE hat now, but once put on they can’t be removed…
In the mode of lighting beacons, might it be possible for the forum members to create the same with a page here, perhaps a bit like a poll, where the number of alerts of something going wrong might indicate a cloud problem ?
You’re 100% right. We could make a webpage but we’d probably have to host it on our own domain. Also, we would want to figure out a way to control who posts to it if we start to get trolls.
I get what you’re suggesting, but I really think we need something from the horse’s mouth. We already have the support threads here that fill up with random speculation when something goes wrong. What’s missing is the equivalent of any of these:
Yes, that’s no help to anyone, hence my suggestion of the ‘poll’ format, such that only a simplified data gathering might be available - ticked boxes ?
It is meant only as a stopgap till GF can create a proper status page as suggested above.
This is vaguely familiar and would be great. It is officially in the hopper, but as we know, the hopper is like Pandora’s box. The only thing left in it is hope.
