New tools on the iCarol Status Monitor

Have you visited the iCarol Status Monitor lately? Easily accessible by going to http://status.icarol.com, this site provides information about iCarol system availability.
This site went live years ago as a way for us to communicate availability and uptime to our clients. We know that our system response is extremely important; any outage or delay impacts not just you but the help seekers using your service. We take our commitment to that very seriously and so this status monitor was a way to communicate that information to you directly. The page even includes our overall uptime (99.95% as of this blog posting) measured every two minutes by an independent third party.
Various areas of iCarol are tested every few minutes and our engineers are made aware right away of potential issues or outages. This means we’re alerted and working on resolutions immediately to minimize the impact on our users.
To continue adding on to what’s communicated, we recently made some enhancements on this page to provide more specific information regarding Response Times.

Please note that the the times shown above are in fractions of a second. The response time shown is also the result of a single transaction, a ping to a single page in iCarol at the time of the test, not an average or continuous measurement. These tests happen periodically, once every several minutes. So it’s not an overall average but a response to a ping at that given moment.
Some areas have no response time listed. That’s not because of an outage or unavailability of that function, but because for now we’ve only configured these tests for certain parts of the application, choosing to focus first on the areas considered to be most broadly used and impactful to the widest range of our users. We, of course, have hopes and some plans for expansion of tests to more areas for future development.
You’ll also notice the terms NA0 and NA1 appearing here. This refers to our data centers, or set of servers. NA0 is a data center in Toronto used by the vast majority of our clients, while NA1 is a data center set up in San Antonio and used by a small subset of our clients under a special agreement. If you’re not sure which data center your iCarol system points to, it’s most likely that your system is on NA0. This clarification, including explanation of response time can all be found on the status monitor webpage.
We hope you’ll visit the status monitor as needed to check on uptime, especially if you’re noticing any sluggishness in performance. If all is well on the monitoring page, then there’s a good chance your issue is more localized. We’ve also included some internet connectivity troubleshooting tips on the page, too, for your convenience.
We’re committed to providing you with a reliable system and have invested in great infrastructure that supports you in the life saving work you’re doing, and the iCarol Status Monitor is just one way we’re delivering this information to you.