Problems this morning with Bromcom?

[Wizard101]

M

Just now, E_G_R2 said:

They suggest using the app as a work around, great for a school with no phones policy!!!

Also I think most teachers will be against getting the app on their personal phones... Im pretty sure its against GDPR also... We already had a hard time getting them to use 2FA

[simpsonj]

Seems to be resolved now...

[mthomas08]

11 minutes ago, Wizard101 said:

no clue why people want a cloud MIS.

 

Pros and cons.

 

Previously with SIMs I had rebuilt the system 3 times over a few years (upgrading/updating/new server etc) plus in the hope to fix a memory issue which had been around for 7 or so years which took them 3-4 years to finally admit there was an issue.

I had to update/patch regularly at home outside of normal hours - or go through this kind of thing 'downtime'.

Every major update especially the summer ones would cause massive problems which I wouldn't know about till staff tried to do certain tasks.

SIMs would quite often release an update to fix a broken update which didn't fix a previous broken update. Once this it had about 5 updates to fix the original update.

 

I'm not defending Bromcom here but the sheer hours I spent dealing with SIMs issues..  I'd say the reliability was abnout the same. Just not me sitting here spending hours and hours fixing it.

[simpsonj]

20 minutes ago, simpsonj said:

Seems to be resolved now...

Nevermind, having my own internet issues!

[Wizard101]

2 minutes ago, mthomas08 said:

 

Pros and cons.

 

Previously with SIMs I had rebuilt the system 3 times over a few years (upgrading/updating/new server etc) plus in the hope to fix a memory issue which had been around for 7 or so years which took them 3-4 years to finally admit there was an issue.

I had to update/patch regularly at home outside of normal hours - or go through this kind of thing 'downtime'.

Every major update especially the summer ones would cause massive problems which I wouldn't know about till staff tried to do certain tasks.

SIMs would quite often release an update to fix a broken update which didn't fix a previous broken update. Once this it had about 5 updates to fix the original update.

 

I'm not defending Bromcom here but the sheer hours I spent dealing with SIMs issues..  I'd say the reliability was abnout the same. Just not me sitting here spending hours and hours fixing it.

Agreed those are same issues I had with SIMS and disliked, I didnt have the final decision in the move to Bromcom but I had my doubts on the reliability and raised this concern.

 

 If the cloud MIS is not going to work, I'd prefer to go back to on-prem SIMS. Yes, working with SIMS could be a bit of a headache and tedious, but you got used to their system and how it worked. Their support was pretty good and helped resolve issues as well. 

 

 I could get on the server and see what's going on and get it working again for staff, and if it was something I thought needed further investigation I could raise with SIMS support to help me look into it.

 

This is affecting the whole operations at the school. Schools run of MIS and the MIS being down for 5 days (more or less), is unacceptable. I haven't been given any Root cause analysis or anything.

Just "The Team have seen the service return to normal operation. They are continuing to investigate the root cause of the issue this morning, and will update you ASAP" But yet I've yet to see their RCA.  The same issue happened beggining of February and the start of September which they have said they fixed.

 

I don't know what kind of fixes they are doing but clearly its not a fix. And I'm getting tired of having to tell staff bromcom is down again every morning.

 

P.S. Maybe its just a Bromcom thing

[synaesthesia]

What are people doing for their backups? Obvious paper registers are a thing, I saw a few posts ago someone is doing it on Excel. Anyone else doing anything clever that might save time & effort when this happens tomorrow?

[Synkrox]

3 minutes ago, synaesthesia said:

What are people doing for their backups? Obvious paper registers are a thing, I saw a few posts ago someone is doing it on Excel. Anyone else doing anything clever that might save time & effort when this happens tomorrow?

I use a shared Excel spreadsheet and ping the link out to all staff.

I think it creates the least mess

 

[pete]

As a heads up, in the new version of the Student App > My Timetable appears to be pulling from the class teacher's "Legal Name" field rather than the "Preferred Name" field.

 

Student App > My Timetable will show teacher legal name instead of preferred name or salutation.

 

Student App > My Subjects will also show legal name.

 

Student App > My Subjects > Calendar icon shows salutation.

 

Cue a bunch of teachers being asked "Miss, did you get married?" this morning by our nosier students.

[BlackCat80]

This is beyond poor now. How many mornings in a row does this need to happen before Bromcom admits the technical team is clearly out of its depth? The same issues, at the same time of day, over and over again, and schools are just expected to keep absorbing the disruption. It is embarrassing. Schools are paying a lot of money for this system, and right now that money is being wasted. Staff are being forced back onto paper registers, lessons are being disrupted, safeguarding processes are being put under pressure, and all Bromcom seems able to offer is another vague update saying it is “under investigation”. That is nowhere near good enough. From a customer point of view, it genuinely looks like the people managing this platform do not have proper control over it. Either they do not understand the root problem, or they do understand it and still cannot fix it. Neither is acceptable.

Edited March 9 by BlackCat80

[mthomas08]

4 hours ago, Wizard101 said:

 If the cloud MIS is not going to work, I'd prefer to go back to on-prem SIMS. Yes, working with SIMS could be a bit of a headache and tedious, but you got used to their system and how it worked. Their support was pretty good and helped resolve issues as well. 

 

I'd rather not. I can think of a lot of things I'd rather have back..  

This level of problems is not a good look for Bromcom.. but I do not want SIMs back.

 

has anyone managed to get a response as to why Bromcom reliability is poor for the last week or so?

[Synkrox]

10 minutes ago, BlackCat80 said:

This is beyond poor now. How many mornings in a row does this need to happen before Bromcom admits the technical team is clearly out of its depth? The same issues, at the same time of day, over and over again, and schools are just expected to keep absorbing the disruption. It is embarrassing. Schools are paying a lot of money for this system, and right now that money is being wasted. Staff are being forced back onto paper registers, lessons are being disrupted, safeguarding processes are being put under pressure, and all Bromcom seems able to offer is another vague update saying it is “under investigation”. That is nowhere near good enough. From a customer point of view, it genuinely looks like the people managing this platform do not have proper control over it. Either they do not understand the root problem, or they do understand it and still cannot fix it. Neither is acceptable.

 

I totally agree. Heads should roll and a team of experts with a proved track record of enterprise cloud systems parachuted in to sort this.

 

[HC_Netman]

We had an email today saying our catering company were making too many photo requests so they are disabling their API between 8.30 and 9.30am until they resolve it. They did also say it wasn't the primary cause of the problem but it looks like they maybe identifying other issues while they are investigating the cause of all this.

Edited March 9 by HC_Netman

[jthompson]

I have zero interest in having an on-prem MIS ever again. I sleep far better at night since turning off the SIMS server once and for all. Not just from an uptime and upgrades point of view, but from a security point of view. Let someone else take on that responsibility, thanks. I'm not paid enough!!!

 

Yes, these service outages with Bromcom are frustrating, but they're not going to make my stomach drop and my face go all hot quite like a dead server can.

[BlackCat80]

3 minutes ago, HC_Netman said:

We had an email today saying our catering company were making too many photo requests so they are disabling their API until they resolve it. They did also say it wasn't the primary cause of the problem but it looks like they maybe identifying other issues while they are investigating the cause of all this.

That is interesting, but it just adds to the concern really. Even if it was not the main cause, the fact an external catering integration was making enough requests for Bromcom to disable the API suggests there are bigger resilience and control issues here. Schools should not have to work this out through rumours and side emails. Bromcom should be giving a clear explanation of what is actually going on.

[Wizard101]

40 minutes ago, mthomas08 said:

 

I'd rather not. I can think of a lot of things I'd rather have back..  

This level of problems is not a good look for Bromcom.. but I do not want SIMs back.

 

has anyone managed to get a response as to why Bromcom reliability is poor for the last week or so?

Understandable,

 

I asked Bromcom last week if they've identified the root cause of the issues and haven't heard anything back. Asked again today, I'm not expecting them to give us an answer tbh 

[TheRobins]

7 minutes ago, jthompson said:

I have zero interest in having an on-prem MIS ever again. I sleep far better at night since turning off the SIMS server once and for all. Not just from an uptime and upgrades point of view, but from a security point of view. Let someone else take on that responsibility, thanks. I'm not paid enough!!!

 

Yes, these service outages with Bromcom are frustrating, but they're not going to make my stomach drop and my face go all hot quite like a dead server can.

Wow, you shock me. You mean you do not miss having to download ZIP files from the county SIMS team and try and get SOLUS to update!

[BlackCat80]

3 minutes ago, TheRobins said:

Wow, you shock me. You mean you do not miss having to download ZIP files from the county SIMS team and try and get SOLUS to update!

I do not think many of us want to go back to SIMS, but that does not mean schools will just keep accepting this either. If Bromcom cannot provide a stable and reliable service, people will start looking seriously at Arbor instead. That is the reality. After nearly a week of issues, and still no proper explanation, confidence is being damaged badly.

[Wizard101]

5 minutes ago, BlackCat80 said:

I do not think many of us want to go back to SIMS, but that does not mean schools will just keep accepting this either. If Bromcom cannot provide a stable and reliable service, people will start looking seriously at Arbor instead. That is the reality. After nearly a week of issues, and still no proper explanation, confidence is being damaged badly.

 To be honest, I've only heard good things about Arbor not sure why our school decided to go with Bromcom. Us as the IT team strongly advocated for Arbor as some of us were familiar with it

[jthompson]

If the Bromcom web app were to get a couple of tweaks,  I wonder whether that would significantly ease the demand on their resources.

Namely, not opening up new tabs for things so readily, and not loading the full list of students/staff/groups before the end user has had a chance to provide and filters or search terms.

[Synkrox]

09/03/2026 14:40 Service Performance Update (Fix Implemented for Tomorrow Morning)

Following further investigation, our technical teams have identified the primary factors contributing to the performance issues experienced during peak morning usage.

The issue relates to a combination of platform demand during the morning register period and how infrastructure automatically scales to respond to that demand. During the busiest time of day, when many schools access the system simultaneously, the platform experienced a rapid increase in requests. While the system is designed to automatically increase capacity to accommodate this demand, we identified that the scaling process was responding more slowly than required for the speed of the morning peak.

To address this immediately, we have increased platform capacity in advance so that sufficient resources are already available ahead of tomorrow morning’s peak usage period. This ensures the system is operating with higher capacity from the start of the school day rather than waiting for automatic scaling to respond.

Alongside this infrastructure adjustment, our engineering teams are continuing to review parts of the platform that generate higher-than-expected system activity during peak periods. Improvements are currently being developed and tested, and these will be deployed progressively to further strengthen performance and resilience.

We will continue to monitor the platform closely during tomorrow morning’s register period and throughout the day to ensure the service remains stable.

Mark Wilson

Chief Technology Officer

 

Call me old fashioned but I'd have popped a "Sorry" in there somewhere.

And maybe some explanation as to why it has taken so many days for them to discover the issue/resolution (if indeed it is resolved!).

 

 

 

[BlackCat80]

1 minute ago, Synkrox said:

09/03/2026 14:40 Service Performance Update (Fix Implemented for Tomorrow Morning)

Following further investigation, our technical teams have identified the primary factors contributing to the performance issues experienced during peak morning usage.

The issue relates to a combination of platform demand during the morning register period and how infrastructure automatically scales to respond to that demand. During the busiest time of day, when many schools access the system simultaneously, the platform experienced a rapid increase in requests. While the system is designed to automatically increase capacity to accommodate this demand, we identified that the scaling process was responding more slowly than required for the speed of the morning peak.

To address this immediately, we have increased platform capacity in advance so that sufficient resources are already available ahead of tomorrow morning’s peak usage period. This ensures the system is operating with higher capacity from the start of the school day rather than waiting for automatic scaling to respond.

Alongside this infrastructure adjustment, our engineering teams are continuing to review parts of the platform that generate higher-than-expected system activity during peak periods. Improvements are currently being developed and tested, and these will be deployed progressively to further strengthen performance and resilience.

We will continue to monitor the platform closely during tomorrow morning’s register period and throughout the day to ensure the service remains stable.

Mark Wilson

Chief Technology Officer

 

Call me old fashioned but I'd have popped a "Sorry" in there somewhere.

And maybe some explanation as to why it has taken so many days for them to discover the issue/resolution (if indeed it is resolved!).

 

 

 

I am not convinced by this explanation. If this was mainly a capacity issue, why did it take nearly a week to increase capacity for a very predictable morning peak?

The real question is why this suddenly started happening middle of last week. Schools did not suddenly change their behaviour overnight, so it is hard to believe this was just a random demand spike. It feels much more likely that some underlying platform, infrastructure or software change triggered this, and the extra capacity is only treating the symptom, not explaining the cause.  Lots of words but actually says nothing...

[E_G_R2]

40 minutes ago, HC_Netman said:

We had an email today saying our catering company were making too many photo requests so they are disabling their API between 8.30 and 9.30am until they resolve it. They did also say it wasn't the primary cause of the problem but it looks like they maybe identifying other issues while they are investigating the cause of all this.

Same here, the catering firm remoted in and reduced the number of requests.

[Jaan]

Seems to me they dont have the lower scale set "high" enough......

Edited March 9 by Jaan

[jthompson]

I'd imagine "Are the resources scaling up enough at the start of the school day?" to have been the obvious, natural question from the outset. Like, the first thing to look at.

[Cat_Jam148]

I think we all just need to give this small startup a chance...

 

They've only been in the MIS market since 1986 so they're still learning about infrastructure scaling issues...😁

 

*sarcasm*

Edited March 9 by Cat_Jam148