Outages
This document describes the processes to undertake in case of an outage / maintenance by external services (Eftsure, ABR, NZBN...). This extension is designed to work by synchronising with external services, which can be turned off without notice by their respective owners.
Services health
See API Status
Outages
Each external system is responsible for its own maintenance and updates, which may occur with/without notifications. Eftsure inside Dynamics 365 is designed to cope with such outages and restart each service after maintenance. However, when such outages occur, several cloud related features might no longer work, as their service provider may have taken the service offline. Eftsure inside Dynamics 365 introduced several workarounds to allow Dynamics users to keep processing while such outages occur.
Although any outage /disruption is very inconvenient to end users, such maintenance usually runs within a few minutes, less than an hour in most cases, ideally outside office hours. In those cases, it might be easier to just wait for the maintenance window to complete and reprocess failed workflows, if any.
In rare cases, emergency patching occurs during business hours, causing even more inconvenience for the users.
Workarounds
In all scenarios below, configuring a workaround will require your Eftsure key user/admin to alter configuration temporarily and reset it back afterwards. The normal end user won't have enough permissions to achieve these workarounds/config changes with their limited permissions. The PESConfigure duty will be required for any changes to the configuration.
ABR outage
For ABR services, the account registering the ABR Webservices GUID will be notified of all outages, generally 1x or 2x/year for approx. 1h, outside office hours.
When the ABR Webservices are down, the ABN lookups and validations will no longer function correctly, but all ABR information can still be retrieved directly from Eftsure data, or internal D365 cache.
When the ABR Webservices are brought back online, the ABN lookups and validations will resume working without manual tasks.
During an ABR outage, some of the services will still function properly as some ABN information is cached into Dynamics 365 for 24h.
If the outage causes any issue, the administrator can easily turn off ABN services in our Parameters form:
Eftsure outage
As Eftsure inside D365 can prevent AP users from generating payments, a special workaround has been set in place to make sure our customers can still process EFT payments should Eftsure be down for maintenance: We understand our customers will still want to issue payments at this stage, and likely still have the Eftsure signals handy to make educated decisions.
Although the general recommendation will be to sit back and wait for Eftsure to come back online, wait for batches to re-Sync, we understand critical payments might need to occur and infer additional fees if not paid in time.
When Eftsure is down for maintenance, each service call will fail with the following error message:
Processing payments
When such payments are required during an outage event, the following workarounds will bypass Eftsure payment validation temporarily, and need to be re-instated once the outage is resolved.
In case of D365 extension issue, requiring turning off payment validations, we recommend where possible, to verify the payment file either through Eftsure portal payment file verification or using our browser extension,
Allow Not Verified Yet status for payments
This workaround will allow payments on Bank accounts that have not been verified yet.
Disable Eftsure at payment method level
This workaround will prevent any Eftsure checks on this payment method.
Other workarounds
When an outage occurs, the following workarounds will bypass Eftsure validations for bank account creations and updates, as well as payments verifications, and can completely stop Eftsure inside D365. Please use with caution and remember to turn back on after the outage.
Disable legal entity
Any disabled legal entity will no longer display any Eftsure information or run Eftsure processes.
After the outage, remember to re-Enable the legal entity, which will take care of any delta. Then Re-Sync is necessary to sync any delta up to Eftsure.
Disable Eftsure connection
When the system is brought back online, please re-init all legal entities in case any new bank account was created during the outage, then send all vendors back to Eftsure for Sync.
Disable Eftsure configuration key
Turning off Eftsure configuration key requires maintenance mode and D365 Admin permissions, and therefore the least likely option to be used here. The amount of setup to be performed here is likely to disrupt the users more than the original outage.
When turning Eftsure configuration key back on, each legal entity needs to be manually re-Inited and re-Synced to make sure that any new bank account in the system is sent to with Eftsure.
Batches
If an outage occurs while batches are running, the batches will likely fail somewhere in the middle of their processing and some transactions might be rolled back as part of the failure. Batches will keep trying to reach their respective services regardless of their maintenance status and are therefore likely to keep failing until the service is down.
A good practice might be to turn off all related batches during the outage and restore them afterwards.
The Check Batches button will allow the admin user to check batch configuration at these times and highlight any discrepancy between expected configuration and live configuration.
Incremental batches
Several Eftsure related batches rely on deltas to avoid processing huge amounts of information every time. For these batches, last sync date can be found in the Parameters > Batches section. Should there ever be a Sync discrepancy, the administrator can reset the delta dates to a previous value and the next batch will reprocess additional historical records.
Support
At any stage, our support tool is available from within Dynamics 365 to create an incident ticket and communicate with Eftsure support. The support tool will collect information from the current environment to help Eftsure support team assist the user and minimize unnecessary communications.
Our support tool is available throughout the system, using the headset icon:
This tool will start by collecting local information and taking a screenshot of your current screen, then ask for some details about the issue. Once completed, the ticket is sent to Eftsure support and one of our support consultants will be in touch shortly.
