For years, the IT Assistance Center (ITAC) has worked to keep the Texas State University community informed about the status of the vast number of technology services offered by the Division of Information Technology. In addition to email messages informing the community of upcoming planned maintenance or unplanned service interruptions, people were pointed to a webpage known as the IT Service Dashboard. On this static university Gato webpage, services were listed in alphabetical order with a green, yellow, or red stoplight color change status icons. As services underwent planned or unplanned maintenance, members of ITAC Communications would manually update the webpage with the latest to help keep the TXST community informed.
We are pleased to announce a new and vastly improved incident and disruption communication tool called IT Service Status, powered by StatusHub. This new and improved tool offers an interactive webpage full of detailed status information on TXST technology tools and services. The cloud tool exists in a separate location from other technology services, such as Gato, offering an independent communication avenue to better keep campus informed.
Typically, people visit service status pages when they are wanting to learn if a service has been interrupted. The beauty of IT Service Status is that this kind of information is right at the top of the page and easily accessible to all. When an incident is underway, viewers can click on an amber or red color dot (which also changes its inner shape for accessibility purposes) and get detailed information on what is happening. The status is presented along with timeline updates such as being under investigation, identified, in the process of being fixed, or resolved.
In addition to seeing the status of a service, viewers also get full transparency and visibility into the history of each service, including average up time. Shortly after ITAC learns of a planned or unplanned service interruption, ITAC Communications updates the page and informs applicable audiences via email, pointing people to the IT Service Status site to get the latest information. Timely updates, occurring 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, are yet another way the IT Division is bringing transparency to the campus community to help keep everyone informed of IT service availability.
Future plans include expanding this new communication tool to send email updates to targeted audiences per listed service via the tool itself, offering a consistent and streamlined communication channel to faculty, staff, and students. We invite you to look and get to know our new IT Service Status tool.
Jen LaGrange Aguirre is supervisor of IT Assistance Center Communications.
