Computer systems excel at lots of tasks, but not at telling you when they’re down. When they’re down, they can’t tell you much of anything.

To help get around this problem, Information and Educational Technology now posts service and outage notices for critical campus networks and systems on a new public Twitter account: @UCDavisStatus.

The tweets repeat notices posted to the Campus Network and Service Status website, which tracks the operating condition of 16 systems and the campus data networks.

Outages rarely block access to the website, so the website is still the best place to check the status of such services as campus e-mail, SmartSite, Banner and the wireless network. You can also receive e-mailed notices by joining the technotices mailing list.

But as long as Twitter is working, @UCDavisStatus will be working too. Even when the campus network is down, you can still access Twitter through a smart phone, or maybe on a laptop (if you can get online without using the campus network).

“For me, the key benefits are having the flexibility to notify people via Twitter, and to reach a broader audience more quickly,” said Dan Wright, manager of IET’s IT Express Computing Services Help Desk. “The account will help both when a service is down, and when it comes back up. It’s just as important to know when a service is restored.”

The account started quietly, and had gained 52 subscribers — “followers,” in Twitter-ese — by late October. IET expects more followers as news of the account spreads.

The department chose Twitter because the service is free, widely available, and connects easily with other social media. IET has used a separate Twitter account, @UCDavisTechNews, to distribute IET’s TechNews articles since February 2009.

Anyone who routinely tracks the operating status of campus computing systems and networks might want to follow @UCDavisStatus. Everyone else just needs to know they can check @UCDavisStatus whenever they need to, like knowing where to find a flashlight during a power failure.

The posts are short — Twitter limits items to 140 characters — and technical. These entries from late September are typical:

• 7:55 a.m. Sept. 21 — Campus is experiencing intermittent network connectivity issues.
• 9:03 a.m. Sept. 21 — Campus network has been restored.
• 6:40 p.m. Sept. 28 — Due to the 2010 California Gubernatorial Debate, web servers are currently experiencing a high load.
• 2:45 p.m. Sept. 30 — Sympa will be down for performance tuning 9/30 at 21:00 for ~15 minutes.

If those are tweets you’d like to receive, sign up at twitter.com/UCDavisStatus.

For more information, call IT Express at (530) 754-HELP (4357).

Bill Buchanan is a senior writer for Information and Educational Technology.