Skip to main content

ITS Instant Service Alerting

Beginning on May 30, 2023, ITS will automate the status of many of its critical business services to the ITS Status website.

If you think a service is not operational, please call 919-962-HELP (4357) and submit a service request. In addition, while the services are checked at regular intervals, certain business services may be de-tuned slightly to avoid false positives. So “real-time/instant” is as close to immediate notification as we can get without creating too many false positives.

These services have real-time status updates on ITS Status:

Last updated May 17, 2023

ITS Networking:

  • Campus DNS (sc)
  • Campus DHCP (sc)
  • Data Center Hosted (c)
  • Data Center ITS (c)
  • F5 Load Balancing (sc, c, syn)
  • ITS Web Proxy (c)
  • Network Access Control (sc)
  • Network RADIUS (sc)
  • Network Time Protocol (sc)
  • Remote Sites (sc, c)
  • Campus VPN (c)
  • Campus Building Networks (c)

ITS Digital Services:

  • alertcarolina.unc.edu (syn)
  • Sites WordPress (syn)
  • School of Medicine WordPress (syn)
  • Tarheels.live WordPress (syn)
  • www.unc.edu (syn)
  • Web.unc.edu WordPress (syn)

ITS Identity and Access Management:

  • Single Sign On (syn)
  • DUO (syn)

ITS ITSM:

  • ServiceNow (syn)

ITS Education Technologies:

  • Canvas (syn)
  • Panopto (syn)
  • Voicethread (syn)
  • Zoom

Legend:

  • sc = Service checks are performed on the service to check for common faults
  • c = Basic ping connectivity checks are performed
  • syn = Synthetic testing is performed testing web-based functions

Basic process for automated services:

  1. Service fault is detected.
  2. Notification is sent to xMatters.
  3. Simultaneously, staff is alerted to the potential issue, and itsstatus is updated.
  4. The issue is validated by staff.
  5. An update is issued on itsstatus indicating if the issue was real or if there was an error in alerting.
  6. If the issue was real, a major incident is created, and collaboration channels are created.
  7. If the issue is deemed critical, the severity is raised to open a major call bridge.
  8. When the issue is resolved, itsstatus is updated and the major incident is closed.

Keep in mind

While we strive to build monitoring around a service that can detect most failures, our ability to validate every scenario is not absolute. Therefore, it’s possible that a service will show it is operational when it is not. It is also possible for a service to show down when it is up. We will work hard to improve alerting over time.