[bromcom] Go on then what happened!

[Jaan]

This post is aimed at bromcom support, but i've posted it public for everyone's benefit - Interesting outage @ 5pm last night.

 

Is this something to do with the temperature. Will you be disclosing what happened? Our senior staff here are really interested it what is happening with bromcom.

 

We seem to be having lots of outages and performance issues recently.

 

Bromcom is light years ahead of SIMs. It has evolved more in the first year of us having it than SIMs did in my 15 years of using it.....However, its been "Down" more times in the first year of use than SIMs ever had in those 15 years.

 

I understand that a "partial" outage doesn't affect everyone. But a partial outage for one user, out a full outage for another if you can't log on or its so slow it's unusable.

 

I'm really worried about it long term. What reasurances can Bromcom give us to put us at ease that these issues are being addressed.

 

Cheers

[localzuk]

This can't be right... Their status page still claims that there's been 100% uptime for the last 90 days. Even though it is littered with incidents of downtime.

 

We've had 2 days this week so far where it became basically unusable during the school day due to "performance issues". They don't consider that to be downtime either.

[Jaan]

This can't be right... Their status page still claims that there's been 100% uptime for the last 90 days. Even though it is littered with incidents of downtime.

 

We've had 2 days this week so far where it became basically unusable during the school day due to "performance issues". They don't consider that to be downtime either.

 

 

It seems performance issues is slang for "well its working in country X so its not down, just you can't use it in the UK"

 

[Cat_Jam148]

As someone who is looking into moving our MIS away from SIMS, this isn't giving me confidence in Bromcom...

 

They were slow responding to emails regarding booking a demo, whereas other MIS providers got back to me within 24 hours. Now the outages people are reporting are making me consider the alternatives in a more favourable light.

 

How long have these outages and performance issues been impacting the system?

 

Not a good start Bromcom

[Bromcom_Support_2]

This post is aimed at bromcom support, but i've posted it public for everyone's benefit - Interesting outage @ 5pm last night.

 

Is this something to do with the temperature. Will you be disclosing what happened? Our senior staff here are really interested it what is happening with bromcom.

 

We seem to be having lots of outages and performance issues recently.

 

Bromcom is light years ahead of SIMs. It has evolved more in the first year of us having it than SIMs did in my 15 years of using it.....However, its been "Down" more times in the first year of use than SIMs ever had in those 15 years.

 

I understand that a "partial" outage doesn't affect everyone. But a partial outage for one user, out a full outage for another if you can't log on or its so slow it's unusable.

 

I'm really worried about it long term. What reasurances can Bromcom give us to put us at ease that these issues are being addressed.

 

Cheers

 

Good Morning Jaan,

Thank you for your comments.

Whilst there have been some performance issues, as per our service status page, can I ask you to contact support if you have any problems as we cannot assume that all issues are linked.

 

Kind Regards

Bromcom Support

Edited July 20, 2022 by Bromcom_Support_2

[Jaan]

As someone who is looking into moving our MIS away from SIMS, this isn't giving me confidence in Bromcom...

 

They were slow responding to emails regarding booking a demo, whereas other MIS providers got back to me within 24 hours. Now the outages people are reporting are making me consider the alternatives in a more favourable light.

 

How long have these outages and performance issues been impacting the system?

 

Not a good start Bromcom

 

 

For us, we weren't affected by the critical system outage yesterday (5pm, but didn't affect the UK ) We've had "performance issues" on and off since we Migrated from SIMs approx 18 Months now.

 

Bromcom say performance issues as it only affects a "less than 10% of users". But if you're in the 10%, in my option it's an outage.

 

That being said, the difference between SIMs and bromcom is Day and night, and i wouldn't go back to SIMs. However, our senior staff here are keeping a close eye on this as if it doesn't improve, they will look elsewhere.

 

here's a link to their service status page for the last 90 days. https://status.bromcomcloud.com/

[Jaan]

Good Morning Jaan,

Thank you for your comments.

Whilst there have been some performance issues, as per our service status page, can I ask you to contact support if you have any problems.

 

Kind Regards

Bromcom Training

 

we do, that's not the reason for this post. I think Bromcom needs to publicly talk to its customer base and keep them in the loop.

[TechMonkey]

Wasn't it Bromcom that had an 'interesting' definition of downtime?

[Jaan]

Wasn't it Bromcom that had an 'interesting' definition of downtime?

 

Yes, but in their defence they did update the service status page a lot and listened to aspects of what people were saying they wanted to see. Not sure if the 10% thing was changed to trigger status changes.

[E_G_R2]

Definite performance issues this week.

 

Typically staff will ask if the internet is down. When asked they will say BROMCOM is slow loading or responding and other web pages are fine.

[mthomas08]

We've had a few complaints about performances and issues but they do get reported to Bromcom.

 

As for SIMs issues, we had plenty of those over the years. I like to think these outages recently are more down to demand and I hope things are much better next year.

Our data manager keeps talking about performance issues but that hasn't impacted me. I am constantly pushing out and dealing with parents for MCAS and barely had any issues.

 

I do get the emails of downtime and I've only noticed performance issues once - which they resolved. BUT, the emails do seem to be coming almost weekly.

 

I can't sit here and compare downtime of SIMs vs Bromcom. SIMs consistently had problems over the years:

- Memory issue (which I wasted 5-6 years trying to resolve) which magically fixed itself a year ago just before I migrated the server.

- Patch A or B or C or D or even E! has broken SIMs (this happened often and I usually delayed updates/patches until necessary or installed in holidays)

- Patch X required for the data manager to fix problem Y

- Random crash issue with random error which means nothing

- Random crash issue with actual useful error which goes back to SIMs for a patch

- Performance issues which means I must run a long list of patches and tweaks and updates (then the data manager does her part) - the result tends to mean nothing

 

I'm not defending Bromcom but I can't sit here and act like SIMs was smooth sailing. SIMs consistently was poor and required a lot of work throughout the year.

 

In a positive note - everyone knew how to use SIMs and where everything was. I won't seriously consider the good and bad of Bromcom for another 6-12 months.

[Koldov]

Wasn't there a post recently about how many schools they had just taken on?

 

Seems there is a lot to be said for the near vertical climb their platform has had to scale up to recently?

[Theblacksheep]

 

Bromcom say performance issues as it only affects a "less than 10% of users". But if you're in the 10%, in my option it's an outage.

 

That being said, the difference between SIMs and bromcom is Day and night, and i wouldn't go back to SIMs. However, our senior staff here are keeping a close eye on this as if it doesn't improve, they will look elsewhere.

 

We're getting a bit tired about it hearing from support "it's not widespread" when it's impacting 100% of our 20 schools.

 

"SIMS didn't have this many performance issues" or "SIMS wasn't this slow" - SLT. It's got worse over time.

 

We constantly get fobbed off about the performance issues that are not shown on the status page. Unable to replicate or we'll look into it while users struggle though the day, issues we see in all our schools.

 

90 day tracking on the status page is kinda pointless when only 64 of those days matter when you exclude weekends. Of those schools are on low usage for 20% of the time too, so our experience is concerning our senior team.

[Bromcom_Support_2]

I've PM'd you to arrange a call about this.

[ITGuyNW]

I'm always seeing Bromcom performance issue threads these days. Can't say I would recommend them to SLT if we ever shop around. Seems to be constant issues and denials.

[CHiLL]

The lack of public acknowledgement or willingness to engage in a public forum is concerning.

[Jaan]

Wasn't there a post recently about how many schools they had just taken on?

 

Seems there is a lot to be said for the near vertical climb their platform has had to scale up to recently?

 

We asked this question before we signed. They said that their infrastructure can be dynamically scaled so that new customer can be catered for without affecting existing users. They also said their "world wide" data centers can cater for data center site outages so customers weren't affected.

 

Not sure how many UK based data centers they are in, but i'm sure with GDPR it said something about keeping data within the UK. Not sure of the legal technicalities of that tho. but hopefully their multiple uk centers.

[Jaan]

I've PM'd you to arrange a call about this.

 

For the benefit of your customers that users this forum, post it here.......

 

The lack of public acknowledgement or willingness to engage in a public forum is concerning.

 

Yes i agree

[paulkerton]

Not sure how many UK based data centers they are in, but i'm sure with GDPR it said something about keeping data within the UK. Not sure of the legal technicalities of that tho. but hopefully their multiple uk centers.

 

They run on Azure, so 2 UK based data centres in London and Cardiff - plus Belgium, North Europe aka Ireland, West Europe aka The Netherlands, Finland, France, 3 German Centres, and Sweden in the EU. Plus Norway as an EEA country.

 

One issue may very well be Azure UK capacity right now, as Cardiff has no capacity at the moment and London has limited capacity too.

[Mako]

This is a bit concerning seeing as 2 of our schools are moving to Bromcom this Summer, and my school is scheduled for the next academic year.

[ordeology]

Although I no longer work in education, handling our SIMS servers was always a job I tried to give to someone else to do. They were a nightmare. We did a really crude calculation once for how much it costs per year for maintenance and unplanned downtime spent dealing with SIMS issues, I think it came to about £60,000 per year. I can't quite remember how we got to that figure as it was few years ago since I did it. I did present it to our COO as part of a draft business case to move to a cloud based provider. However the CEO was happy with SIMS and wasn't going to budge or even consider looking at alternatives.

[paulkerton]

Personally, I think people have to realise that yesterday was a really exceptional day, and whilst you can and they do operate data centres in the hottest parts of the world, rarely would organisations spec UK and Northern Europe Data Centres to the same levels as they would in Qatar or Jordan.

 

I heard quite a few reports of data centres struggling, and it wouldn't surprise me if this caused cascading failures, leading to the issues seen yesterday. Perhaps the lesson is to distribute your platforms and apps across multiple providers. I'm sure all services that struggled yesterday would have a lot more resilience if they pushed their tools across Azure, AWS, GCP, IBM Cloud rather than just a single provider.

[Michael]

I've had no reports of outages or performance issues. To the best of my knowledge Bromcom are fully Azure, so even if they took on additional schools, capacity shouldn't be an issue.

 

Arbor comparatively (again to the best of my knowledge) use Amazon and likewise I've not had reports of outages or performance issues.

 

Both companies are right in using highly scalable infrastructures, but there's always the possibility that clusters of these servers could be problematic or under-delivering, so both should have access to full reporting.

[Jaan]

Personally, I think people have to realise that yesterday was a really exceptional day, and whilst you can and they do operate data centres in the hottest parts of the world, rarely would organisations spec UK and Northern Europe Data Centres to the same levels as they would in Qatar or Jordan.

 

I heard quite a few reports of data centres struggling, and it wouldn't surprise me if this caused cascading failures, leading to the issues seen yesterday. Perhaps the lesson is to distribute your platforms and apps across multiple providers. I'm sure all services that struggled yesterday would have a lot more resilience if they pushed their tools across Azure, AWS, GCP, IBM Cloud rather than just a single provider.

 

But the uk data center was unaffected by the "major" outage with a 100% availability/uptime

 

It could be something to due with the heat or fires that are currently happening in euro land. Just odd that they (Bromcom) can't just say issue X was caused by Y, this is or isn't related to the performance issues you've been experiencing.

 

When we ask about it, they just say book a job with our support team.

 

When i look at the their forum or known issues section, it's just users requesting support on how to dos or general queries.

 

The service status page just says - It was broken, now its not.

 

There was an issue with a widget that caused slowness for some users last week. Why did this happen, will it happen again, what has been done to ensure it doesn't happen again. Is it due the load on the data centers, is it out of your hands, are things going to get better, how are you addressing these issues.

[paulkerton]

But the uk data center was unaffected by the "major" outage with a 100% availability/uptime

Doesn't matter if they're reliant on other centres too for their international customers - that could've caused a cascade issue as services shifted across locations. It wasn't just the UK having huge heat yesterday.

Edited July 20, 2022 by paulkerton