GPS Insight Blog » Availability

Apr 20 2010

Why I hate Microsoft (or why resetting your Ford Sync GPS is a bad idea)

Category: Availability, California, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Navigation, Google Earth, Routing, competition — rdonat @ 10:49 pm

Obviously I am pretty dependent on GPS for just about everything when it comes to getting around [also for money...].

I have 3 GPS Navigation devices with me when I drive my car (factory installed, Garmin, & my iPhone) so I never print directions any more.

So, on the way out to Long Beach a couple weeks ago, my family and I took our 3 month old car with Ford’s/Microsoft’s “Sync” system (with GPS Navigation). No directions, just our factory installed GPS navigation unit.

Just outside of town it crashed on us. I figured out how to do a factory reset and get it back up & running.

Here’s the point: AFTER RESETTING IT, I FORGOT TO TELL IT “FASTEST” & NOT “SHORTEST” when optimizing our route. DOH!

We took the 10 out to LA area, but then it took me through some really sketchy, slow-moving areas.

On the way home, I thought about it, & realized I needed to change my GPS setting to FASTEST from SHORTEST.

I was curious how much longer it took me time-wise to get there than to get back, so I ran a 3D history report & saw very quickly that it was twice as long (60 vs. 30 minutes):

Run a week long history for our trip to/from Long Beach

Slow, direct route vs. Fast, indirect route

All I had to do is look at the 2 points where the route deviates then converges again, and compare times and distances:

Where I took a GPS dictated "dumb turn"

The times/mileages are:

Going there: 17:47 & 4571.6 miles to 18:53 & 4602.5 miles

Coming back: 10:26 4618.8 miles & 10:58 & 4656.3 miles

Doing the quick math, it took 31 miles & 66 minutes there the “short” way, & 37.5 miles & 32 minutes (half as long) the “long way.”

So to save 6.5 miles, I wasted 34 minutes of my life, praying we didn’t get car-jacked. At least if we did, I would know where the car went…

Anyway, I thought of this the other day & was curious just how much extra time it took us because of that one GPS setting on my (Factory Installed — not GPS Insight…) navigation device.

Because I track that vehicle, it took me about a minute to figure it out using GPS Insight.

Oddly enough, while I was writing this, my new Microsoft Windows 7 box crashed Google Earth as well. It knew I was badmouthing Microsoft. Sooner or later, all things Microsoft eventually crash.

I’m really glad we don’t run our systems on Microsoft products.

I just checked and our two “primary” servers which our customers rely upon (with lots of auxiliary and backup servers, of course) have been up for two years to two years & 3 months:

GPS Insight servers run for years without incident

I’m glad most of our competitors run Microsoft though…

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Navigation, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking, microsoft, system availability

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Aug 31 2008

GPS Insight is there for you — 24 x 7 x 365 !

Category: Availability, GPS Insight Employees, Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 11:11 am

This Labor day weekend, we’re still taking calls from new customers who are installing their first units, forgot how to run a particular report, etc. We get our support calls 24×7, no matter what day it is.

I thought I would write a blog article and quantify just how available our service and support is to our customers.

First, I’ll run a Tech Support phone Queue report for all of 2008:

We see our average hold time at 14 seconds (up from 12 seconds last year, but we just hired 2 more tech support representatives to help that!):

We answer 96.8 % of all tech support calls, and of those which we don’t get to in time, the customer’s average hold time is only 31 seconds, a max of 2.1 minutes. When’s the last time you sat on hold for ONLY 31 seconds and thought that was too long?…

But what about our servers and systems availability?

It’s not quite 100%, but pretty close. Here is a report I ran for all of 2008. I have to blur the names of the servers, due to security, but it should help give you an idea for just how much time our systems are available to you. An average of 99.594% availability, but really, the few servers which “bring us down” from 99.97-100.00% for most of our important servers are “expendible” such as the one called “olap-02″ (shown in the picture below with a 96.021% availability rate). These servers are “extras” which we use to speed your experience during peak traffic, for large report requests like state mileage for a full quarter Sometimes we take them offline to make changes, but ensure that your reports are always available to you, or better yet, delivered to your email every day automatically.

The other server you see is “web-01″ which had an availability of 99.989% for the year so far.

That is only 58 minutes of “unavailability” in the entire year (and generally due to unavoidable “other carrier” network problems between our office and the secure facility where we run GPS Insight).

Here you can see that it hasn’t been rebooted for over a year — 343 days, and it’s barely breaking a sweat (it’s Labor Day Sunday, no one is really using the product):

We go to GREAT LENGTHS to make sure our product and our support staff are available to our valued customers 100% of the time. There is tremendous redundancy built in, so we can make sure that no matter what happens to a hard drive or network card, our customers will never see an interruption of service.

Plus, we have the tools and processes in place to help quantify it for our customers. If you’re not a customer, but considering GPS Insight vs. another vendor — ask them for this information and see if they can provide it. Call THEIR tech support to see how long you’re on hold & if they drop you to a voice mail box or offshore? Then call ours & see how quickly we answer — 866-477-4321, press 2 for tech support, & 1 to bypass the recording detailing our online http://support.gpsinsight.com tools.

Thanks,

Rob.

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

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