Did you know that…
- In December 2018, more than 30 million users of a British mobile phone operator lost access to data services due to a software failure.
- Another bank had similar problems in 2012 and 2015. In one case, it failed to process 60,0000 payments in time (again, some of those payments were wages and benefits). In the other case, a problem with a scheduling software affected 6.5 million customers of this bank.
- In April 2019, 81 call centers of US emergency services became unavailable due to a software error. About 6000 people calling 911 were unable to connect in Washington and six other states.
Source: The biggest software failures in recent history
What do all the above cases have in common?
Several things.
First, all the companies were established businesses.
Second, they suffered losses due to technical malfunctions.
More importantly, could something like this happen to your company? Probably, yes.
Most of the above business had sound processes, yet they did not prevent those incidents. You cannot have a good process for every edge case. For this reason, I did not mention company names in the above list – it would be unfair to them because nobody is immune to the Murphy’s law. Including you. It’s not a question of whether, but a question of when.
If you use Camunda as part of your IT infrastructure we cannot guarantee that Camunda or the systems it orchestrates will never fail. This would be irresponsible. But we can help you to detect such errors as early as possible.
Say Hi! to the e-mail incident notification plugin, which you can use to get notified whenever a technical failure occurs in your Camunda system.
- It buffers the error messages such that if you have 100000 incidents in a minute you won’t get 100000 e-mails.
- There is documentation in English, German, Russian, Italian and Slovenian languages for now, but we are adding few more languages in the coming weeks. The documentation includes as well as step-by-step tutorials for installing this plugin in Spring Boot and Tomcat-based Camunda systems.
We developed and tested it according to the best of our capabilities. But don’t take our word for it: Camunda inspected this plugin and decided to incorporate it into their community plugins. This means the plugin got the blessing from the very makers of your favorite process engine: Camunda.
Now you can use it to make sure that when a disaster happens, you learn about it fast enough and thus have more time to respond.
Written by Dmitrii Pisarenko
Developer at J-IT IT-Dienstleistungs Gesmbh
