[bromcom] Bromcom SSO Issue / Slowness

[SupTech]

I called up support and our Data Manager called up just after I did. I got told there's been no reports of it, of course not your lines open at 8am when I called.... Anyway, when the Data Manager called apparently someone made a change whilst we were on the phone then it started working again. I can see a few others having the issue on 'Brom Community'. Give them a call hopefully they can get it working for you quickly.

[themightymrp]

Yes they are now however before 8:10am they weren't hence the suggestion that people should rerun any reports that ran before 8:10am.

 

Edit: Actually I suggest everyone go through and check your reports, all of ours have had the filter settings removed which has made many of of them useless or unreadable.

 

I sincerely hope they haven't done this - I already had to re-setup our reports before Christmas (nearly 100 scheduled) because they broke them. It would take too long to do it again!

[themightymrp]

OK the filter settings still seem to be there (phew) but I still can't run them from the scheduled reports screen

[SupTech]

I sincerely hope they haven't done this - I already had to re-setup our reports before Christmas (nearly 100 scheduled) because they broke them. It would take too long to do it again!

Seems some are fine, and others aren't he's compiling a list now. I'd also suggest keeping an eye on anything exporting data such as Wonde or Groupcall because I'm seeing errors in the error log from them which arn't usually there.

[themightymrp]

@Bromcom_Darren - what the heck is going on???

[localzuk]

Our Data Manager is frustrated as at around 9am she still couldn't run reports. So, it doesn't appear to be fixed.

[themightymrp]

Our's is throwing fits! The Power Bi dashboards she's been working on are mangled.

 

Incidentally, a comment I put on the Bromcom Community regarding their "Announcement" this morning over last weeks issues has been removed by their moderators. It came from our Business Director and went thus:

 

"If the subpar service and performance were an isolated incident, it would be unfortunate and frustrating. Regrettably, there is a persistent underperformance in meeting contractual expectations, particularly concerning planned upgrades and seemingly every September after onboarding. Your system is rapidly becoming unreliable and sluggish. Our teaching staff is losing faith in your ability to fulfil the essential requirements as a student Management Information System (MIS).

 

Unless improvements are implemented swiftly, we will have no choice but to explore alternative providers. The reliability and speed of your services must align with our expectations to ensure the seamless functioning of our educational processes."

[Bromcom_Darren]

Our's is throwing fits! The Power Bi dashboards she's been working on are mangled.

 

Incidentally, a comment I put on the Bromcom Community regarding their "Announcement" this morning over last weeks issues has been removed by their moderators. It came from our Business Director and went thus:

 

"If the subpar service and performance were an isolated incident, it would be unfortunate and frustrating. Regrettably, there is a persistent underperformance in meeting contractual expectations, particularly concerning planned upgrades and seemingly every September after onboarding. Your system is rapidly becoming unreliable and sluggish. Our teaching staff is losing faith in your ability to fulfil the essential requirements as a student Management Information System (MIS).

 

Unless improvements are implemented swiftly, we will have no choice but to explore alternative providers. The reliability and speed of your services must align with our expectations to ensure the seamless functioning of our educational processes."

 

Good morning,

 

I have messaged Phil directly and advised him that his CSM will be in touch.

 

Darren Moody

Community Manager

[supportman]

I actually have lots of sympathy since Bromcom is clearly having growing pains with all the new schools joining.

 

Seeing the incident report and knowing what the problem is now gives me much more confidence that they can fix it and will improve over time.

 

Scaling is never easy and I've been in similar situations myself where everyone is shouting very loudly about an unplanned outage, but actually the long term fix is what's really important and powerful lessons are always learned.

 

But as someone who runs a backend network I also know you need to plan for this type of thing 6 months or a year ahead. Getting close to capacity and still adding more customers is clearly a bad idea.

 

Anyway, hopefully just growing pains and I look forward to a reliable and performant future. I'm just glad its your guys problem to deal with and not mine

[TechieJI]

Bromcom chosen to deliver MIS services to 1,100 schools in Northern Ireland

 

https://bromcom.com/news/bromcommis-northern-ireland

[themightymrp]

2 years ago I would have said 'bravo', today I say 'capacity better flipping improve!'

[kennysarmy]

https://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/222210-bromcom-performance-issues-peak-times.html

 

Date of thread.

[Marci]

Our's is throwing fits! The Power Bi dashboards she's been working on are mangled.

 

Their inability to spot that issues are common and linked when something goes wrong is driving me insane. Livefeed output from QuickReports still contains unparsed headers. The only thing they've fixed around live feeds is the fact they were throwing 500 errors, but the content is still useless. I'll hazard a guess it's the same header parsing that's been tripping up the scheduledreport handler.

 

Think we're all now in a state where ScheduledReports derived from QuickReports are OK, but from older Adhoc reports are not.

Livefeeds derived from older Adhoc reports are OK, but from QuickReports are not.

[Dr_Zeux]

For the last few days we have had issues with logging into Bromcom using the sign in with Google button. And once we are logged in, its extremely slow.

We have only been using Bromcom for 4 months and have had 3 outages already. Is this a common issue with Bromcom?

 

Yes, it's very common - and they don't always alert you! Also, the status page is a complete waste of time - it's inaccurate, and seemingly wanting to promote that it's uptime is mostly around 99.9%! You can't actually find the info. necessary for outages on their status page, so you end up phoning the helpdesk!

Edited February 1, 2024 by dbluston

[Dr_Zeux]

Our's is throwing fits! The Power Bi dashboards she's been working on are mangled.

 

Incidentally, a comment I put on the Bromcom Community regarding their "Announcement" this morning over last weeks issues has been removed by their moderators. It came from our Business Director and went thus:

 

"If the subpar service and performance were an isolated incident, it would be unfortunate and frustrating. Regrettably, there is a persistent underperformance in meeting contractual expectations, particularly concerning planned upgrades and seemingly every September after onboarding. Your system is rapidly becoming unreliable and sluggish. Our teaching staff is losing faith in your ability to fulfil the essential requirements as a student Management Information System (MIS).

 

Unless improvements are implemented swiftly, we will have no choice but to explore alternative providers. The reliability and speed of your services must align with our expectations to ensure the seamless functioning of our educational processes."

I'm not entirely surprised the comment was removed - they don't want any bad publicity/comments of what schools think, it's not really a forum - more of a 'controlled' bulletin board. They've had 3 out of 4 weeks since the start of term, with outages/issues and apparently it was supposed to start improving - as informed by Alastair McKenzie in his email of 20th December! We're also beginning think the same thing about their services...

[supportman]

Actually Fergal just posted this on the ideas forum. Finally some response after 2 years of mentioning speed issues

 

I believe he is the top guy as well, so hopefully they are working on this as a priority now.

 

Fergal Moane commented 30 Jan 06:03pm

At the risk of getting shot to pieces in a Twitter-style pile on, I have to come back to you all to say 'Sorry' and that the company is indeed investing in performance. Please see the attached incident response, if this hasn't already been shared with you.We have been aware of performance bottlenecks during the morning peak, and are working on improving this. We have been moving to 'Platform as a service' where things such as web servers, database servers etc. scale up during periods of peak demand. And some mistakes were made last week, but the commitment is there to make things better. We also need to optimise certain parts of the system where pulling relatively large amounts of data through is slow (e.g. manage attendance, large groups lists, larger quick reports etc.)

So there is no magic 'go faster' switch that we can just throw, but each piece of the platform is being worked on to scale it up, from hardware and infrastructure to reducing bottlenecks in the software itself. As a few people have mentioned, having the teacher app is good alternative when there are issues with the web front end.As per the incident report, we are also looking at how reporting and communications around outages or service degradations can be improved.As a recent headteacher, I know what it is like when things like cover and registration can't be done in a timely manner and the knock on effects for the school day. I make sure this message is passed on and the senior people in the firm are focused upon this issue.

Edited February 1, 2024 by supportman

[Bromcom_Darren]

I'm not entirely surprised the comment was removed - they don't want any bad publicity/comments of what schools think, it's not really a forum - more of a 'controlled' bulletin board. They've had 3 out of 4 weeks since the start of term, with outages/issues and apparently it was supposed to start improving - as informed by Alastair McKenzie in his email of 20th December! We're also beginning think the same thing about their services...

 

As mentioned above I contacted the customer directly via direct message and the case has been replied to via the helpdesk.

 

The Community isn't a controlled bulletin board, but it is a live forum where 6000 customers have engaged, problem solved, liaised with Bromcom staff, attended live events and much more. We have to have a degree of moderation as does any forum to ensure this standard is maintained.

 

I am always happy to discuss ways of improving our community and would be more than willing to listen to any feedback or ideas you may have to assist with it's growth moving forward. I can be contacted directly on [email protected] or via direct message either on this forum or the community.

 

Thanks

Darren Moody

Community Manager

Edited February 1, 2024 by Bromcom_Darren

[Dr_Zeux]

As mentioned above I contacted the customer directly via direct message and the case has been replied to via the helpdesk.

 

The Community isn't a controlled bulletin board, but it is a live forum where 6000 customers have engaged, problem solved, liaised with Bromcom staff, attended live events and much more. We have to have a degree of moderation as does any forum to ensure this is standard is maintained.

 

I am always happy to discuss ways of improving our community and would be more than willing to listen to any feedback or ideas you may have to assist with it's growth moving forward. I can be contacted directly on [email protected] or via direct message either on this forum or the community.

 

Thanks

Darren Moody

Community Manager

 

With all due respect Darren, there isn't much negativity about what customers really think and struggling with on the Community. If you look on here, and/or FB groups, you get a much wider picture of the complaints and the real struggles that schools face related to Bromcom outages/performance issues... I would genuinely like to give you feedback around the community, as I have done with my previous CSM, some of which was fed back (apparently) but our school no longer has a CSM. One idea would definitely be around improving the 'development ideas', that seem to be completely ignored, no matter how good the idea is or how many votes it has...

[supportman]

With all due respect Darren, there isn't much negativity about what customers really think and struggling with on the Community. If you look on here, and/or FB groups, you get a much wider picture of the complaints and the real struggles that schools face related to Bromcom outages/performance issues... I would genuinely like to give you feedback around the community, as I have done with my previous CSM, some of which was fed back (apparently) but our school no longer has a CSM. One idea would definitely be around improving the 'development ideas', that seem to be completely ignored, no matter how good the idea is or how many votes it has...

 

At the recent Bromcom event I went to they specifically said they had a new team to work on the forgotten ideas portal.

 

I think they said all the top ideas would essentially be fixed but don't quote me on that hehe There was a new team working on them apparently.

 

They also mentioned ongoing work on performance as I quoted above from Fergal (he was at the event as well).

[Bromcom_Darren]

With all due respect Darren, there isn't much negativity about what customers really think and struggling with on the Community. If you look on here, and/or FB groups, you get a much wider picture of the complaints and the real struggles that schools face related to Bromcom outages/performance issues... I would genuinely like to give you feedback around the community, as I have done with my previous CSM, some of which was fed back (apparently) but our school no longer has a CSM. One idea would definitely be around improving the 'development ideas', that seem to be completely ignored, no matter how good the idea is or how many votes it has...

 

I am well aware of current issues that are being investigated and I am more than willing to assist or feedback any concerns you may have.

 

Once again happy to discuss with you moving forward.

 

Thanks

Darren Moody

Community Manager

 

- - - Updated - - -

[themightymrp]

As mentioned above I contacted the customer directly via direct message and the case has been replied to via the helpdesk.

 

The Community isn't a controlled bulletin board, but it is a live forum where 6000 customers have engaged, problem solved, liaised with Bromcom staff, attended live events and much more. We have to have a degree of moderation as does any forum to ensure this standard is maintained.

 

I am always happy to discuss ways of improving our community and would be more than willing to listen to any feedback or ideas you may have to assist with it's growth moving forward. I can be contacted directly on [email protected] or via direct message either on this forum or the community.

 

Thanks

Darren Moody

Community Manager

 

And yet I'm still awaiting contact from our CSM... funny that.

[Dr_Zeux]

At the recent Bromcom event I went to they specifically said they had a new team to work on the forgotten ideas portal.

 

I think they said all the top ideas would essentially be fixed but don't quote me on that hehe There was a new team working on them apparently.

 

They also mentioned ongoing work on performance as I quoted above from Fergal (he was at the event as well).

 

Figures crossed on all of this, but in the meantime, we (their customers) continue to suffer and waste time submitting 'development ideas' as suggested by the helpdesk

[Bromcom_Darren]

And yet I'm still awaiting contact from our CSM... funny that.

 

I have spoken directly with your CSM and the case has been escalated further and the case replied to. Rest assured we are working to resolve any outstanding issues.

 

Thanks

Darren Moody

Community Manager

[Dr_Zeux]

And yet I'm still awaiting contact from our CSM... funny that.

 

We don't even have a CSM, so you're lucky!

[Dr_Zeux]

I am well aware of current issues that are being investigated and I am more than willing to assist or feedback any concerns you may have.

 

Once again happy to discuss with you moving forward.

 

Thanks

Darren Moody

Community Manager

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Thank you Darren - if I don't hear back from Customer care very soon (re: my official complaint email), I will indeed get back to you to see if you can help. One of our biggest issues currently is that we don't have a CSM, he left around 3 months ago, we have not even had the courtesy of being informed by Bromcom - for our 4 schools (Consortium). I had guessed he left when the emails to him simply bounced back and it said the 'user no longer exists'. Moreover, who is the replacement - again, would be nice to be informed who this person is, and not have to chase this up 3 months after the last CSM left! Who am I supposed to liaise with at Bromcom, if we don't have a CSM?