A DicksonOne Bug, A DicksonOne Solution.

At Dickson, our customers are our number one concern. Sure, a lot of companies say that, but we mean it. Below is just one example of the steps Dickson takes to ensure customer satisfaction.

Late Tuesday, July 16th, a scheduled maintenance release was pushed to the DicksonOne servers. On Wednesday morning a DicksonOne user made us aware of an issue surrounding alarm values being changed in DicksonOne. By that afternoon the issue was resolved. It affected just 37 accounts.

Below is the exact response from one of our developers breaking down the root cause of the issue. It illustrates our dedication to solving issues quickly and having a full understanding of why they occurred in order to prevent them from happening in the future.

From the developer:

We’ve released a fix for this bug. The bug was introduced into prod with our release yesterday. The release included updates to how alarms are triggered and alarm emails generated.

Bug Explanation

Alarm values stored in Celsius were incorrectly treated as Fahrenheit values and run through the C to F conversion equation. This occurred any time an alarm was triggered. The new temperature value often caused more alarms, triggering the conversion again, driving alarm values to -9999.99 or 9999.99.

In short, this affected customers with alarm temp unit of C who had an alarm trigger or change state.

Aftermath

With the fix in place on prod we used a database backup from yesterday morning to restore affected alarms to their prior values (the value before the bug was introduced).

There are 3 devices with new alarms that we had no previous data for, so these customers will need to manually update their alarm value.

The attached spreadsheet includes the details for these 3 devices as well as the contact information for all customers likely affected by this issue.

The owners of the three devices weren’t the only ones notified, anyone who could have possibly been affected was notified as well.

To recap, here is a timeline of yesterday’s events:

9:00AM: Dickson was alerted to the bug.

10:00AM: Our web developer, TableXI is called.

3:30PM: Problem is resolved.

5:00PM: Information on those customers likely affected is received.

 If you have any further questions on this issue, or any issue with DicksonOne, feel free to contact us at 1-800-757-3747.