UAOnline Partial Outages
Problem Impact Analysis
Event Occurrence: March [15, 17, 20 , 23] 2026 Employee Self Service; April 2, 2026 Employee Self Service; April 7, 2026 Finance Self Service; April 8, 2026 General Self Service
UAOnline is the self service portal for Ellucian Banner used as the university’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Banner and UAOnline are hosted by the vendor Ellucian, also the maker of the product. From time to time during initial validation of new upgrades, not all defects are experienced. The self service components of Banner include General, Employee, Finance, and Student self service. All of these are separate applications that are made available under the heading UAOnline and navigable between each area after initial login.
Initially Employee Self Service (ESS) was impacted with unavailability on March 15, 17, and 20. Upon report of an issue with the instance the vendor was notified and the corrective action was to restart the service. Noted during these times that some end users were able to access the platform while others could not. On March 20th the service owner escalated further related to this issue. Ellucian shared 2 product defects related to ESS that they expected to cause the issue scheduled of the UA production environment in May. Ellucian recommends instituting daily restarts of the Employee Self Service instances to occur in the UA daily maintenance window of 4am to 5am. The earliest Ellucian could schedule was March 25, resulting in another outage on March 23rd and an escalation response to Ellucian to restore service. On April 2nd, after mitigation was in place, ESS failed again and Ellucian further escalated to prepare a fix to address the product defect specifically for ESS. A patched version of ESS was deployed on April 3rd in TEST and validation was reported back to Ellucian on April 6th to go into production. Further issues with ESS were not identified. On April 7th, Finance Self Service(FSS) went down and was reported to Ellucian and Ellucian configured daily restarts. April 8th, General Self Service (GSS) was reported down and escalations were entered with Ellucian. On April 10, all self service apps were scheduled to be updated similarly to ESS with daily restarts. All but GSS were successful with this update.
The Banner and UAOnline services should be available 24 hours a day 7 days a week with the exception of scheduled and planned down time including the daily maintenance window. The system should always be responsive.
Ellucian’s review of the application hosts that were failing showed the available disk filling up related to a large amount of logs being created in a very short period of time. Ellucian attempted to mitigate this with a daily restart, but demonstrated during this time that the issue could manifest in just a few hours. Ellucian traced to specific product defects that they believed were causing the excessive logging issue. They attempted to mitigate this issue by establishing daily restarts and by creating a non-standard custom WAR file for deployment and management of each Self Service Application. Ellucian later discovered that there was a bug in the text manager product component that when using a MEP environment like UA has, could cause the excessive generation of error log messages which is likely what was filling the disk. Ellucian has released an update for each of the Self Service applications out of band to address the product defect.
May 11, 2026: Verify all self service applications are working as expected.
July 5, 2026: Verify status of ESS to be upgraded.