Root cause and timeline: Between the hours of 12:05 PM EST and 12:52 PM EST, Goldcast had downtime on the event app and the registration app, as well as impaired functionality on the admin panel. This was due to a release that had taken place to some backend systems at the beginning of the time period, specifically the user registration service and authentication service. The tech team became aware of the issue at 12:10 PM EST when alerts were triggered. Due to the nature of the issue, a simple rollback of applied changes wasn't possible, and a few mitigation techniques were tried unsuccessfully until a failover was initiated at 12:31PM EST. While some service was restored shortly after the failover, there was some service duration for the next 21 minutes.
Steps moving forward: We have a strict policy of making risky releases only over the weekend or immediately following a weekend (when the number of events on our platform is drastically lower). Generally this helps to ensure that any possible downtime would affect customer experience as little as possible. We have also improved our playbooks after this recent incident and are now better prepared to quickly mitigate failures in the subsystems that were affected.
We’ve been really busy since our last product update! With more and more events and customers utilizing the Goldcast platform, we’ve been receiving some amazing feedback on what event organizers would like to see - and we listened. Check out the features and improvements we’ve created in the past two weeks.
While the Goldcast developer team had the power to create and manipulate current features for our customers, there’s nothing quite as amazing as having the power to do it yourself. As a result, the Goldcast tech team has put the power into the hands of our customers. Here are a few features you now have control over right in your Admin Panel:
Add Pre-Roll for Events
While attendees wait for your event to kick off, do you want them to listen to music? See a product demo? Showcase a company trailer? Whatever your event and marketing team has envisioned, you’re now able to directly do this from Stage Options.
Turn Off Public or Session Chat
From Stage Options, you’re now able to choose whether or not you’d like to enable both Public Chat and Session Chat, utilize just one of them, or turn off both.
Get More Creative with Colors
Within the Branding tab, you’re now able to choose if you’d like the color of your buttons to be the same color as your secondary color.
Create Tracks for Your Conference
Directly from the Space tab, you are now able to create new tracks, rename those tracks, and determine which events are in all tracks or just one or two of them.
Rename Your Event Tabs & Descriptions
Within Advanced Settings, you’re able to change the name of tabs within the Goldcast platform. For example, if you’d like to rename the “Rooms” tab to “Networking,” you are now able to do so. Additionally, you can write up a description for each room, which will show directly below the page’s header.
Enable Speaker Tab & See Speaker Overview
Directly from the Space section in the Admin Panel, you’re now able to click the “Speakers” tab to do two things: