3

Does anyone know of an easy way to determine the status of the BlackBerry network, outside of observing that your BlackBerry isn't working anymore or receiving email alerts from RIM?

Some of our users were affected by an outage on Sunday, and we'd like to have a way for our helpdesk staff to quickly determine whether there is an issue with RIM, or an issue with our internal BES or mail system. We do get service advisories from RIM via email, receiving email alerts when your BlackBerry isn't working can be a challenge. :)

duffbeer703
  • 20,077
  • 4
  • 30
  • 39

7 Answers7

3

This is a community-based list so it's not a trouble-shooting tool or a definitive availability notice but it may be useful:

http://www.dataoutages.com/mailman/listinfo/bb-outage

Dan

damorg
  • 1,198
  • 6
  • 10
  • 1
    The more I learn about BlackBerry, the more I'm puzzled by its success. How do you manage to build a communications solution with a huge single point of failure, and get away with minimally documenting scheduled and unscheduled outages? – duffbeer703 Jun 24 '09 at 19:41
  • 3
    You could say the same thing about twitter. – Joseph Jun 24 '09 at 20:02
  • heh. We've quietly wondered the same but I believe the usefulness of the messaging integration + the popularity with sales forces and management accounts for a lot of it. What's the term? Executive engagement? ;) – damorg Jun 24 '09 at 20:30
  • 2
    the big difference, of course, between twitter and RIM is that tweets are free. So are farts. :) – Guamaniac Jun 27 '09 at 16:05
  • Somehow I doubt that BlackBerry is a single point of failure, much like all the other cloud services out there I expect they have more then one datacenter and likely quite a few. Don't forget the crap from the likes of AT&T's (or whoever) network you need to deal with too should it actually be AT&T that isn't working, while T-Mobile is. – SpaceManSpiff Nov 13 '09 at 12:10
  • 1
    I believe there is still just a single Relay set up in Waterloo that almost all North American BB traffic gets routed through. – Ophidian Nov 13 '09 at 13:29
2

The new BES 5.0 has a decent included monitoring service you can install seperate from the BES itself to monitor everything.

SpaceManSpiff
  • 2,547
  • 18
  • 19
  • The BES 5 SDK also has some webservice API's that will let you ping out to individual handhelds to verify that they are reachable. IIRC, this is part of the component process that Boxton automates. – Ophidian Nov 13 '09 at 13:26
1

BoxTone prices start at around $10K for the BlackBerry Essentials monitoring solution and can support up to 500 devices. Might be all that's needed.

1

Airwatch is a great solution and very cost effective.

1

The only product I've ever found to do this is BoxTone.

Joseph
  • 3,787
  • 26
  • 33
1

Automate the following process

1) Send an email to a blackberry user with the following subject line: <$Confirm,RemoveOnDelivery,SuppressSaveInSentItems> 2) You will get a confirmation delivery provided the following are true:

Connectivity from Email > BES > Handheld is operational Blackberry user is not out of reception.

Bill Weiss
  • 10,782
  • 3
  • 37
  • 65
booyaa
  • 223
  • 3
  • 12
0

If you purchase a premier support contract with RIM, then they will actually contact you/your support group and inform you of issues as they happen.

This is a feature of a premier support contract (very expensive). It used to be available to T1 or T2 subscribers. The names of the contracts have changed, so you will have to contact your sales rep to find the most cost effective one for you

makerofthings7
  • 8,821
  • 28
  • 115
  • 196