You’ve put lots of blood, sweat, and tears into developing a great online product, and you’re ready to launch it.  But how are you going to handle the inevitable problems and issues that that cause down time once you’re open to the public?  You realize that you need to create an escalation plan—one that specifies who should be responding first.  Should it be the Network Operations Center (NOC) at your data center?  Or should it be your developers?  Someone else?  In my experience, more than 90% of the time, the problems that arise are due to software bugs or configuration issues, and not hardware or networking.  That argues for your developers to be the first responders.  Otherwise, you’re wasting precious time while the NOC finds one of their technicians to try to troubleshoot the issue, only to discover they can’t do anything about it.

On the other hand, a developer usually can determine very quickly if an issue is a hardware or networking problem and call the NOC.  (Most networking problems that take the site down are catastrophic.)  The developers are also going to be most familiar with how the latest code is supposed to work, whereas the data center folks may be pretty unfamiliar with your site, especially since you are just one of many clients that they support.

When you write your escalation plan with developers as the first responders, you may get some grumbling from them.  After all, who wants to get awakened in the middle of the night?  But think of this as an incentive.  The more solid the code, the less likely they’ll get called.  And if they do get called in the middle of the night, you’ll be darn sure that they will put in a really solid fix for the issue.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Data Centers, Software Development . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.