MetService Website (2013)

[Nev]

Not an apparent cacheing problem this time Michael but yes, they're still having major problems their 3-hourly synoptic obs, i.e. still no wind-directions and quite a few sites only showing one or two readings.

On another note, who said NZ's climate wasn't getting more extreme… lol

MetService Website - Yesterday's Obs.png

[RWood]

I don't use the website heavily enough to have issues with it. But I wish NIWA's CliFLo would occasionally provide some sort of reasonable response time in the weekends! Virtually unuseable then.

[jamie]

Anyone else finding the site down along with the app? Can't get anything.

[melja]

Yes i am, also there web based site to.

[Nev]

The site's been down since exactly 4am. If it's maintenance, it couldn't have been more ill-timed.

[Razor]

Its almost unforgivable for the govt provider to be down so long during a serious weather event. Imagine if it was IRD or Winz there would be heads rolling

[melja]

Yep and no rain warning for the area around chch to, huge fail all round really.

[CHCH Weather Chaser]

I was going to comment last night about how 50mm had already fallen and that plenty more looked to be coming and that a warning should have been out. Now here we are with surface flooding all around the city, rivers that have burst their banks, houses with water through them and basically 100mm in parts of CHCh city! With is hugely significant.

[NZ Thunderstorm Soc]

It is a well used site, probably one of the most used internet sites in New Zealand , with millions of hits every day.
They can't, like other things, maintain their sites , just because of the weather

[Manukau heads obs]

I see they have added the rain radar to the back up server
http://www2.metservice.com/rain_radar.html
thats good

[spwill]

Yes, not a good look for MetService today, a big weather week coming up as well.

[tgsnoopy]

Appalling, that is all.

[David]

At least it happened today and not Thursday or Friday!

[Orion]

"No images available" on Rain Radar...

[CHCH Weather Chaser]

Just saw that myself! Great! They better fix that and soon.

[Razor]

"No images available" on Rain Radar...

Week from hell for Metservice IT!!!

[tgsnoopy]

Has anyone seen an explanation from Metservice as to what failed and why it took so long to fix?

[Nev]

From MS's facebook page ...

Hi everyone - just a little explainer on what happened. The issue was not with our website, but with non-supply of data caused by a hardware failure on the database server; despite full redundancy of this system, the second unit also failed and the site kicked into backup mode. We'll be doing a full review of both the system and the service to ensure we minimise any future risk of the same failure happening again. Thank you so much for your patience and for engaging with us here on social media. Thanks also to our awesome technicians & developers who worked all night to ensure forecasts, watches and warnings got to where they needed to be.

https://www.facebook.com/MetService

[nick]

Fixing something like that could have been a very big job depending on what the hardware failure was, if they had to rebuild the database and all of their streaming systems to the web server then its not suprising it took that long to get it back up and running.

[Razor]

]This is the sort of stuff that bugs me with metservice site.

Why bother with the computer generated charts if they are so divergent from the actual forecast, especially when its all on the same damn page, and for tomorrow night. sub zero with precip? yeah right!

grrrr....gripe over for now

[Flutterbye]

Have a look at some of the extreme lows their computer is generating for ChCh on Friday!

Not sure if they look at some areas actual conditions when they do their forecasts but for the second time in a matter of days, In,gill has not been updated. Maybe someone from Metservice could log in and explain...

NIWA seem to be more accurate at the moment!

[bmo]

The computer generated graphs are becoming very useless...forecasting lows of -9 while at the top of the page for Friday its saying a low of 2 for Christchurch.

[Flutterbye]

The computer generated graphs are becoming very useless...forecasting lows of -9 while at the top of the page for Friday its saying a low of 2 for Christchurch.

I agree! I can't believe they even bother having them there.

Glad you posted that screenshot. (I couldn't remember how to post an image, lol)

[Razor]

It drives me balmy and just plain misinforms the more casual users of the site. A lazy image.

[Bradley]

Probably one of the many reasons that Metservice won't be around in 6-12 months according to reports!!!