April 12-13 PowerSchool Outage Notes

Post date: Apr 13, 2017 3:17:31 PM

On April 12-13 MPS PowerSchool experienced a significant outage spanning the majority of two days.

This outage was caused by different versions of the SIF (School Interoperability Framework) software running on different PowerSchool nodes. Typically updates are seamless and are done in a top-down fashion, however for whatever reason this one was not seamless and caused configuration issues.

SIF is a very powerful framework tool that allows for Automatic Data Flows from PowerSchool to other MPS Systems, like Destiny, RoutePlanner, SchoolMessenger, and other programs.

One of the SIF agents had a bad password for authentication against the PowerSchool database. SIF was trying to connect a few times a second, eventually the database thought it was being attacked and it shut itself down and went in to a safe mode.

After a few hours of logging and analyzing PS node traffic we were able to find which SIF node was malfunctioning and we removed it from the node cluster.

As of 10:30am 4/13/17 PowerSchool appears to be working for most user needs.

There is still a part of PowerSchool Administration that is not working right and will take more time to troubleshoot, but this is used be only a couple people.

At this time it does appear to be OK for teachers and administrators to use PowerSchool.

Please call the HelpDesk at x4357 with any issues.

Thank you,

Eric Wells