Start of semester recap

UIT prepares for each new semester well in advance, but despite best efforts, challenges can sometimes arise.

This semester, a major issue with the Campus Information Services (CIS) portal on August 19, 2019 caused an unplanned outage, which impacted the university community as classes resumed. In consultation with Oracle, the vendor that provides the technology for CIS, UIT teams worked to restore the portal. A simplified version of the CIS landing page was temporarily made available during troubleshooting, and all CIS services were gradually restored.

To help prevent a similar outage in the future, load testing strategies will be reviewed and refined.

Mike Ekstrom, director of UIT Communications Infrastructure, led this semester’s start of school task force. At the August IT Professionals Forum meeting, he gave an overview of measures taken by UIT to prepare for the surge of demand on IT infrastructure. Here are some highlights:

Key efforts

• Applications
  
  A battery of load tests, the process of placing demand and measuring the response of IT systems to optimize performance and capacity, was conducted iteratively on PeopleSoft and other critical systems leading up to the new semester.
  
• Monitoring
  Upgrades and additional investments in system monitoring are ongoing.
• Fiber and network backbone
  
  While major construction on campus invariably creates risk, Ekstrom said organizational preparedness efforts included a thorough review of core network backbone pathways and redundancy, resulting in improved pathway diversity and resiliency.
• Network and wireless
  
  Eight academic buildings received additional or updated wireless access points (APs). Core network gear at the university's Downtown Data Center was also upgraded.

Standard preparations

• The start of school task force was reconvened.
• A phone bridge and Teams collaboration space were in place to expedite the resolution of any IT incidents.
• Focused staffing plans included walk-in help for IT services at multiple locations — including Plaza Fest, Heritage Center, and Lassonde Studios — during the first week of classes, and University Television (UTV) and Help Desk staff attended Housing & Residential Education (HRE) move-in week events.
• To reduce the risk of campus and clinical outages, UIT put a change moratorium into effect from August 12-23. Another moratorium will be in place on August 29-31 when tuition is due. Changes permitted during a moratorium are vetted with extra scrutiny based on a stringent risk/benefit analysis.

Ekstrom noted several notification tools that the U community can use to stay informed of activity in the IT environment, particularly NotifyIT alerts (with SMS and email options); the system status web page uofu.status.io and companion @UofUITStatus Twitter feed (the same information as NotifyIT messages); and a university application health summary status.it.utah.edu that's geared toward IT staff and contains more granular information (access requires a campus IP address).

 

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