Snow Storm Effect On Traffic

Tuesday afternoon a bit of snow hit Georgia. We get them occasionally even down here in the southern United States. Usually they hit the mountains. Everywhere else, we just shut down for a few days. Unfortunately, we do not have all of our Atlanta schools on one system or all of our south Georgia schools on one system. Each system has some of each.

These graphs for current connections (application servers to database so an inference to end users) to Desire2Learn do tell these stories:

1. Some Atlanta universities shut down around noon. Just before noon and moving quickly down, we had fewer and fewer users.
2. While campuses were closed, some faculty kept their due dates and had students turn in work via Desire2Learn.
3. Wednesday was a delayed opening for several campuses, so the first peak of the day was around 4pm instead of the normal 11am.
4. Based on Twitter rumblings a bit of our traffic were students checking to see whether or not class was canceled.

My conclusion is we kept 60-70% of our normal traffic while around 75% of our campus user base was closed.

We will have fully made it when these closing cause our numbers to go higher than normal because when they get home they come into our system to keep working.

P.S. If we had gone with the desired technical architecture of a database/application stack dedicated to each school, then I could show these numbers per school not just per site.