Maintenance and notice
Infrastructure needs work done to it. The question is whether that work is planned far enough ahead that you can ignore it.
How we try to run it
Most maintenance on a well-built network is invisible, because there is more than one of everything. A switch upgrade, a carrier taking a link down, a power feed being worked on — if the design is right, traffic moves and nobody notices.
We plan far ahead deliberately. Capacity is added before it is needed rather than when it runs out, and hardware is replaced on a schedule rather than after it fails. The result is that genuine service-affecting maintenance is rare, which is a design decision rather than luck.
When something will be noticed
If planned work will affect your service, you are told in advance by email to the contact on the account, with:
- What is being done and why
- The window, in UTC and local time
- The expected impact — usually “brief loss of one path”, occasionally a reboot
- What, if anything, you need to do
Windows are outside business hours wherever the work allows it. If a window is impossible for you — a product launch, a month-end run — say so. We can often move it.
Emergency work
Occasionally something has to be done immediately: a failing component that will take a machine with it, or a security fix that cannot wait for a window. We do it, and we tell you as soon as it is in hand rather than afterwards. You will not find out from a monitoring alert and a silence.
Hardware work on your machine
A failing disk, a dead power supply, a module to be replaced. This is agreed with you directly in the ticket rather than announced broadly, because the timing is yours to choose — see hardware failure. We do not reboot your machine to suit our schedule.
What we expect from you
Keep a contact address on the account that someone reads. The most common reason a customer is surprised by maintenance is a notification sent to a mailbox nobody has opened in a year. If several people should receive these, tell support and we will add them.
If something affects you that was not announced
Open a ticket, or mail support@novogara.com. Tell us the time, the machine and what you saw. If it was ours, you get a straight answer about what happened — and where the SLA applies, it applies without you having to argue for it.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base