What will end users see during an AHA data center transfer?

[jamie_girouard]

Our instance is being "moved" (for lack of a better word) from one data center to another this weekend.   ServiceNow talks about 15 minutes of downtime during this maintenance window.  

What will customers see during this window?  

Will the instance be unavailable (i.e., users get some kind of cryptic HTTP error when they try to access it) or is there some kind of page that comes up altering customers that the system is temporarily unavailable?

[Jacob_Andersen · Accepted solution]

This might be a better question to ask the SN support team.   Simply respond to the incident that notified you that your instance was being moved.   I believe every planned outage may be a little different.

[She Sull]

We were "moved" back in January and I, as the Sys Admin, was only aware of this due to the notifications they provided. As a "follow the sun" service provider we didn't notice any impact; the transfer started at midnight eastern time and completed within an hour.

With that said you probably still want contact HI or your SNow account manager to verify, just thought I'd share my experience.

Hope that helps!

- Sherry

[jamie_girouard]

Sherry Sullivan - thanks for the response.   While I'm confident that there won't be any issues, I'm being extra cautious since we are, like you a "follow the sun" service provider.

Jacob Andersen - Crossfuze - I've gone ahead and contacted HI.   Waiting on a response.

Thanks, all!

[Tom R_]

During one of the AHA switchovers, I monitored the process to see if I could catch what an end-user would see. I was able to catch what a user would see in the web browser as the actual switchover was taking place (see images).

I also monitored the transfer with a PowerShell script (attached) trying to get to my instance. While HI Support says this switchover can take up to 15 mins, in my observation, it happens much quicker. In the output, you can see the transfer occurred in two minutes. I'm sure there are other startup process that need to kick on the instance at the data center which may account for the 15 mins reported by HI.

2018-04-17 20:31:58Z 200 OK
2018-04-17 20:32:58Z 200 OK
2018-04-17 20:33:59Z 500: Internal Server Error
2018-04-17 20:34:59Z 500: Internal Server Error
2018-04-17 20:35:59Z 200 OK
2018-04-17 20:37:00Z 200 OK