RavenDB Cloud Global Status vs. Product Status

One of the interesting components of RavenDB Cloud is status reporting. It turns out that when you offer X as a Service, people really care about your operational status.

For RavenDB Cloud, we have https://status.ravendb.net/, which will give you some insights into the overall health of the system. Here are some details from the status page:

The interesting thing about this page is that it shows global status, indicating issues affecting large swaths of users. For instance, Azure having issues in a whole region in the image above is a great example of one such scenario. Regular maintenance, which we carry over the span of days, is something that we report, but you’ll usually never notice (due to the High Availability features of RavenDB).

It gets more complicated when we start talking about individual instances. There are many scenarios where the overall system health is great, but a particular database may suffer. The easiest example is if you run out of disk space. That affects that particular instance only.

For that scenario, we are reporting Production Monitoring Alerts within the RavenDB Cloud portal. Here is what this looks like:

As you can see, we report specific problems on those instances, raising that to your awareness. That was actually needed because, for the most part, RavenDB itself handles those sorts of things via High Availability, which means that even if there are issues, you’re likely to not feel them for a while.

Resilience at the cluster level means that even pretty severe problems are papered over and the system moves on. But there is only so much limping that you can do. If you are running at the bare edge of capacity, eventually you’ll trip over the line.

Those Production Monitoring Alerts allow you to detect and act upon those issues when they happen, not when they bring down production.

This aligns with our vision for RavenDB, the kind of system where you don’t need to have a full-time babysitter monitoring the system. Instead, if there is a problem that the database cannot solve on its own, it will explicitly notify you, in advance.

That leads to a system that is far healthier all around and means that you can focus on building your system, rather than managing database minutiae.