System Down 2 days in a row

Ann Barden

This is the second morning in a row that I've come in and not been able to do any work in FE. The response from support is maddeningly slow. It finally was up and running yesterday halfway through the day and now it's down again!

Is anyone else experiencing this issue right now. If you look at Blackbaud's status board it says operational but it certainly isn't operational for any of us at my workplace!

We just transitioned to FE in July and I've been playing catch up as it is. To lose 2 days of work is never good but it is putting me so far behind I feel like I'll never get caught up. I'm beyond frustrated!!! ?

Crystal Bruce

@Ann Barden Hi Ann, I'm so sorry for the frustration. I did reach out to support on my end to ensure they know you are still having performance issues. I've also reached out to your Customer Success Manager. The status board is the best way to stay on top of operational status. Thank you and I hope this is resolved soon!

Renee Elliott

@Ann Barden Yes we are having the same issue today as we did yesterday with the system down. It has just resolved for us and is working now about the same time as yesterday.

Ann Barden

@Renee Elliott Same here. We are up and running now but were down almost the whole morning just like yesterday.

Ann Barden

@Crystal Bruce Thank you. The issue is resolved for now. I don't like to borrow trouble as a rule but I'm concerned we are going to face the same issue tomorrow morning. I'd appreciate you doing whatever you can to avoid this.

As to the status board, I use it every time we are having an issue and it did not reflect reality today or yesterday. It said FE was operational.

Crystal Bruce

@Ann Barden thank you!

Jennifer Elliott

@Ann Barden

We've been also experiencing outages, mostly in the afternoons though.

Are you having any difficulties with the reports at all? We've been struggling since the end of September and with little response or feedback from support!!

Ann Barden

@Jennifer Elliott I'm sorry to hear that you are experiencing outages too.

I'm not having any particular problems with the reports other than learning my way around them, lol.?

Are you having outages related specifically to the reporting module or some other problem with reports?

Jennifer Elliott

@Ann Barden I hope the issues you are having are resolved. Our experience with the “outages” are separate from the GL reporting issues. It was last week where none of the fiscal staff were able to effectively use NXT.

Jennifer Hughes

@Ann Barden We have not been down completely but have experienced extremely degraded service the last two days. Unfortunately, this seems to be the normal for FENXT but it has been recognizably slower than usual the last two days. We have days when it will be useable and then we will have a day or a morning or afternoon where the green orb just blinks and reports slow to a crawl. We have had multiple tickets and support has been good at trying to help, but there has never been any real resolution because there is nothing specific to point to that can be fixed on our end. We simply have days, maybe twice a week that the system is slow to the point of being unusable. Most days the system is slow but at least things are working but hardly a day goes by that staff aren't complaining about the system being slow.

Ann Barden

@Jennifer Hughes It's been working ok today. I've noticed that I can't move too fast on my first one or two transactions of the day. If I go too fast it freezes up and I have to close out & re open and then it's fine. That happened this morning but otherwise it seems to be working fine.

I wonder if some of the issues have to do with them migrating modules over from database to webview? I'm hopeful things will get better once that migration is complete.

Ann Barden

@Jennifer Hughes I meant to add that it sounds like you're down more often than we are. This week was the worse. I'd say we've had 1 issue a month since going live.

Coleen Dolinsky

@Jennifer Hughes
Our organization has experienced off and on slow ups, some of them severe where all FE processes freeze up. Then there are times when things are working well. This was especially problematic running reports. We have an open escalated case with Blackbaud, where we tried adding real-time case notes when things hit the fan. A couple weeks ago, the analyst replied that the “engineers” saw something, and after that processes have been better. But then our Raiser's Edge groups began having the same type of slow ups (in database view). Our IT group is suspicious that Blackbaud may be trying to save resources by structuring workflows into queues that cause workflow traffic jams (thus saving themselves money on servers and other infrastructure resources). This is speculation because we don't know the inside scoop. But I wonder…. We're spending way too much time calling for help!

Chad Konsult

@Ann Barden
Nothing is more frustrating when you can complete the work that you need to get done. Let's connect offline. 614-203-1718 chad@datamoose.org