Reply To: MMW Data Outage?

Thanks Robert, Cal, Jim and others for this thread, and to @shicks for providing all those updates on the Hologram situation.

I would like to add that our team overseeing the Monitor My Watershed portal has also noticed some issues on our end, which are separate from the Hologram issues, and we are working on improving MMW services.

Many of these issues have been apparent since the COVID-19 work-at-home orders were put in place. Since then, we’ve noticed intermittent 502 & 504 gate errors responses from our server (either when browsing via the web or when posting data from a monitoring device) and we’ve noticed a general slowness when browsing the portal.

One of the issues is that since COVID-19, the web servers at LimnoTech that host MMW are getting a lot more internet traffic as LimnoTech staff use our VPN to work from home and for other reasons.  To that end, LimnoTech done a number of upgrades to LimnoTech’s network that resulted in several planned 1-2 hour outages from time to time. Although we’ve seen some improvements, this hasn’t solved all the issues. We’re continuing to work on optimizing our network.

The other issue is that Monitor My Watershed is running on an aging software stack, which could probably benefit from a not-so-trivial round of updates.

The Stroud Water Research Center and LimnoTech are committed to long-term maintenance and development of the Monitor My Watershed data sharing portal. We have developed a roadmap for the next phase of development, and are presently exploring funding options to get started. If you have any leads for potential funding, please contact us! Every drop counts!

Our development roadmap includes hosting MMW on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for enterprise-class up-time. It also includes addressing various “tech-debt” items that naturally accrue as a software system ages, along with many other items that we’ve listed in our Release 0.12 – Tech Debt / Refactor Code milestone on GitHub.