Zenprise alerts customer about data outage at AT&T

The end-to-end view of BlackBerry® service provided by Zenprise has always been of (a lot of) interest to me. Besides detecting specific issues impacting users, Exchange and infrastructure issues affecting BES, what has been particularly exciting is our ability to detect issues with RIM's SRP network, and also those with carrier networks in use by Zenprise customers.

Both of the above types of outages are rare, but when they do occur, the resulting user impact, help desk calls, and time spent troubleshooting before narrowing it down to RIM or the wireless carrier results in many wasted man hours.

Zenprise for BlackBerry has successfully detected (and provided advance warning for) a RIM outage in the past (read previous post: "ZDNet: Zenprise gave indications 2 hours before the BlackBerry outage").

Reproducing the equivalent of a RIM outage in a test environment isn't difficult, but how does one reproduce a carrier outage? Could we ask AT&T, Verizon or Sprint to turn off their wireless network so we can test Zenprise? Or just have them switch off the data network? Of course, there are other more realistic workarounds in test environments, but how do we validate this in real-world situations?

What just popped in this morning from my Google Alerts should make Zenprise, and our customers, very happy:

My company just installed the Beta Version of Zenprise Tuesday of this week. This morning we started getting requests where our Blackberry users were not able to send messages. Instead of our regular ‘reboot the BES to fix all’ process we normally would follow, I was able to see that the all the devices affected were from the AT&T network. I immediately contacted our AT&T rep and she was able to confirm an outage that was affecting the central and northeast regions. Although we have not purchased Zenprise yet, this was an excellent real life proof of concept of its ability to save my team hours of time troubleshooting.

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