Service Outage Notifications

10 September 2020

Over the past few years, ITS has added increased levels of redundancy to the campus network, improved our system monitoring and added cloud-based authentication. Those changes have helped prevent user-visible problems, but when issues inevitably do arise we want to make sure you hear about them quickly.     

Service Status Checker 

During COVID, ITS added a webpage called the “Service Status Checker” which we’re using to provide updates about interruptions of Carleton-hosted and cloud-hosted services. It’s available at http://go.carleton.edu/its-service-status. It also has links to the service status pages of twelve vendor tools used at Carleton, including Google, Zoom, Dropbox and Panopto. This is a useful way to verify whether an issue you are having is an issue for others as well. 

Tech Alerts 

In addition to a site that you can visit to get updates, ITS also has a method to “push” urgent issues with broad impact. For most people a text message will be received more quickly than an email, and during a critical issue that immediacy is important. The “TechAlert” system uses the same tool that Security uses for CarlAlert, but they are separate systems.  You will need to configure TechAlert for notifications separately from CarlAlert. Your email address is automatically enrolled in both systems, but to add your cell phone number, please visit the TechAlert page. 

Note that Security changed to a new system during the past academic year, so you’ll need to “re-subscribe” to both TechAlert and CarlAlert.

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