outage/maintenance window opinion

Wed Mar 30 16:26:11 UTC 2005

The event I stated in my first email was an example, not an actual incident.

I think from the 30+ emails I have received I have had 2 responses that 
said I should start my SLA credits and outage minutes from the beginning of 
the window and the rest that feel the outage minutes start ticking when the 
planned outage was over...

Regarding Change Management procedures, we do have had deadlines for 
backing out, verification, etc etc. But you are right...

luke

At 11:59 AM 3/28/2005, Eric Gauthier wrote:

>Heya,
>
>I disagree as this entire event wasn't a planned outage.  The "planned" part
>was what you intended to do and, if its anything like the maintenance reports
>that I send and receive, you typically state how long you expect the impact
>will be and that it will take place within your maintenance window.  I'd 
>argue
>that you should start the clock ticking when the outage first happened and
>then take off from that whatever you annouced as the impact duration.
>
>For example, if you said that the impact would be a ten-minute outage 
>sometime
>during your window from 2am to 5am and your outage started at 2am, I'd count
>this as an unplanned outage starting from 2:10am.  That's just my $0.02...
>
>On another note, you had a 3 hour window and a 6 hour outage.  It sounds like
>someone didn't seriously consider the "back out" part of your change 
>management
>planning.  You really should have that as part of your process and have a hard
>deadline within the window after which you revert the network to its previous
>state.
>
>Eric :)

Luke Parrish
Centurytel Internet Operations
318-330-6661