How Hornbill Monitors Service Status

Hornbill's monitoring system provides comprehensive, real-time insights into the performance and availability of its services. This system, driven by Hornbill ESP Platform, Hornbill Service Manager, Hornbill AI and ITOM, continuously checks all Hornbill instances every minute. To ensure a reliable and accurate representation of service health, monitoring is conducted from six different global locations. Our SLA is 99.99% uptime, however our internal target is 99.995%.

Key Metrics and Outage Protocol

• The system flags any response time exceeding 100ms for immediate investigation by our operations team.
• An outage is officially posted on the status page if it affects more than 1% of all instances, for longer than 5 Minutes.
• Our application support teams can also manually raise an outage for a "showstopper" defect or application issue that impacts a significant number of customers.

Communication and Transparency

Once an outage is raised, the status page is updated to show the impacted area (e.g., a data center or specific application) and a detailed timeline of events. These updates occur every 15 minutes until the issue is resolved.

• Status Page Dials: The main status page features a series of dials that display endpoint uptime for the last 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, and 365 days.
• Historic Data: The historic stats section provides a heatmap showing uptime over the last 90 rolling days. It also includes links to Root Cause Analysis (RCA) documents for any outages that occurred within the last 12 months. These are also posted on our forum and we aim to post these within 24 Hours from resolution.
• Individual Customer Uptime: Customers can check their specific instance's uptime for the last 30, 90, and 365 days through their customer portal or on request via their account manager.

Troubleshooting Instance Connection Issues

If you're having trouble connecting to your instance, here's a step-by-step process to diagnose and potentially resolve the problem. The first step is to determine if the issue is a general platform outage or a local network problem affecting only you or your organization.

1. Check for Platform-Wide Issues

First, check the Hornbill Status Page to see if there is a known platform-wide issue.

• If an issue is posted: Relax! Our team is already aware of it and working diligently to resolve it. You won't need to take any further action.
• If nothing is posted: The platform is generally operational, suggesting the connection problem is likely localized to your network environment. Proceed to the next step.

2. Use the Instance Checker Tool

If the Status Page is green, your next step is to use the Instance Checker tool. You will find this in the top menu of this page.

• The Instance Checker performs two key tests:
  1. A check from your browser to your instance.
  2. A check from an external server (outside of our customer data center) to your instance.
• Review the results. This will clearly show if your browser is unable to successfully contact your instance. If it indicates a connection failure from your browser, it strongly points toward a network or firewall blockage on your end.

3. Verify Local Network Configuration

If the Instance Checker indicates a failure from your browser, the problem is almost certainly related to your local network, firewall, or Internet Service Provider (ISP) configuration.

You should contact your internal IT department or ISP and ask them to confirm that all required URLs, IP addresses, and ports are open and accessible through your organization's network. All the necessary details for firewall and network configuration can be found at:

https://docs.hornbill.com/hornbill-cloud/firewall-ips-ports

Your IT team must ensure that traffic to all these destinations is not being blocked.

4. Request Support (If Needed)

If your IT department or ISP thoroughly reviews the requirements and confirms that there are absolutely no blockages or configuration errors on your network, you can then proceed to raise a formal support request.

• You can typically raise a call directly via the Instance Checker tool.
• Crucially, you must provide a HAR file with your submission. A HAR (HTTP Archive) file logs all web requests and responses, allowing our support team to see the exact sequence of events and where the connection is failing at a low level. This is essential for advanced troubleshooting. To create a HAR file, Press F12 to enter the developer console, then select the network tab, F5 to refresh and replicate the issue, then right click within the network tab and choose Save As

Frequently Asked Questions