Better Forma Server Resilience / Redundancy

[vaughan.giles7AGEV]

I want to share a recent experience that I had regarding an outage with Autodesk Forma (ACC). 

All dates and times are quoted in terms of NZST.

On 8th July, at around 4pm NZ time we had folk experience issues. 

Some couldn't see folders via DC and could not sync their work back to the cloud, due to errors that didn't make sense such as:

^This looks like a user-error. However, in this instance it was because of an outage on Autodesk Forma; no folder creation / moving had taken place.

It created a very big headache for me, since I had users trying to work and the Autodesk Health Dashboard Status reporting 100% functionality and no affected components.

Timeline

• 8 July ~4pm Autodesk Forma outage hits us. Troubleshooting begins. 
  • I start thinking that folk are not using DC properly due to permission levels but quickly start to suspect something else because of multiple users experiencing similar issues (either syncing issues or folders vanishing).
  • I check the Autodesk Health Dashboard Status, everything is fine according to the page.
• 5-6pm, I create a work-around so users can work in an offline temporary manner.
  • I check the Autodesk Health Dashboard Status again, still reads as fine.
• 7pm users are still experiencing problems.
  • Again, nothing on Autodesk Health Dashboard Status.
  • At this point, I make sure users can work on their individual files in an offline manner in a way that ensures that those changes get captured by the correct users before carefully uploading back to Forma at a later date when everything is fine.
• 9 July 12:43am: Autodesk acknowledge the issue, nearly 9hours after I experienced the initial problem.
• 3:54am: Issue is resolved, ~12hrs from the initial problem.

*I would like to add that this outage was experienced on the same day I migrated this project from a server based environment to Forma; a first time for most users. Not a good way to "show them the light" and how great Forma is! 

Proposed Call to Action

• I want to call on Autodesk to provide more resilient cloud-services please. 
  • In my opinion there doesn't appear to be enough redundancy in-place, given the frequency of outages, especially when compared against competitors such as Bentley's ProjectWise; who have a lot lower frequency of outages.
• Is there a fast-method by which we can be helping Autodesk to identify such issues as they arise? So that outages get reported and actioned a lot faster?

I remain a big advocate for Autodesk Forma.

[vaughan.giles7AGEV]

The system works!