To put it mildly, we’re not satisfied with the current availability of mite. To be honest, we’re heavily frustrated. One hour of downtime on October 15th, fifteen minutes on the 19th and two hours during last night – that’s simply not the level of quality that mite is known for and that you can and should anticipate. We owe you. Not only another apology, but a detailed description of what went wrong and what we’re doing to prevent this from happening again.

What did happen?

Hardware failures in the data center caused all three outages, the app itself was and is running smoothly. The first failure wasn’t connected to the second and the third one. Bad luck and bad timing, it all came together.

On October 15th, an electricity problem occured in our primary data center, despite of redundant power systems being in place, of course. The power systems were undergoing maintenance, that’s when a switch between the two systems failed, due to a combination of a flawed documentation of the hardware supplier as well as a not perfect emergency plan. Power supply was recovered within half an hour, but the servers needed some more time to check all data and to resume their work properly.

The nightly outages on October 19th and 21th were caused by defect network switches. On the 19th, one of this switches broke. Within minutes, it was replaced. Yesterday night, two switches in one blade center by IBM failed simultaneously. Replacing the switches didn’t solve the problem. Servers had to be moved to another blade center, this took some more precious time.

What will be done about it?

Two notes upfront: one, no hardware will always work 100%, not in our data center and not in another one. That’ll simply not going to happen, that’s a reality we cannot change as much as we’d love to – but we can change how we deal with this reality. Two, our top priority is to assure that your data is totally safe, at any given point of time. To guarantee this guideline, we’ll even keep up with some more minutes of downtime, in case of doubt.

What we can do and will do, is a) throw light on every little failure to really understand it and therefore be able to prevent this from happening in the future, and b) enhance uptime by putting more redundancy in place.

In this particular case, after October 15th, the motor to switch between the different power systems was replaced. Plus, our hoster, the folks from the data center and the manufacturer of the systems have joined forces to clarify the error in the documentation and to fix it. Plus, they are discussing to implement another redundant power system on top of the existing one.

The network switches that caused the downtimes of October 19th and 21th will undergo a scheduled maintenance, probably during the next week. We’ll update as soon as we have more information.

At the moment, we’re thinking about how to add even more redundancy on our side, e.g. by adding further systems that could take over in case of a hardware failure.

On the bright side, we’d like to point out that we trust our primary hosting Partner, SysEleven, despite of those numerous downtimes. Monitoring informed us within a minute. Technicians were hands on within five minutes. CEO and head of IT updated us on an ongoing basis, in detail and in a transparent way. They are deeply sorry and definetely unsatisfied with the status quo, as well. They’ll focus on improving the current set-up during the rest of 2010, no new features will be taken on. All in all, their 10 years hosting history shows that this is not the norm, without a question.

Uptime of mite in 2010: 99,93%

Concluding, we’d like to talk about the bigger picture. We analyzed previous downtimes to help you put this into perspective.

From January 1st 2010 until today, mite was unexpectedly down for a total of 295 minutes. This is an uptime of 99,93%. Even if we included scheduled maintenance, mite was up for 99,89%, all in all.

The gap to 100,00% is not big, but not satisfying. We aim to be better than this. We’ll keep on improving every little detail to maximize uptime even further. Please, trust us: we will get better. If you’d like any further information: please, get in touch!

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Update: Since 01:17, mite is back up. Again: we’re so sorry! These outages cannot and won’t continue.

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Since 23:18 CEST, mite is not available due to a hardware defect. Technicians are hands on, already. Please visit Twitter to get the newest information on this issue, we’ll update continuously. We’re terribly sorry, please, excuse us!

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Update (12:41 am CEST): mite is back up now. All of your data is fine of course, there was never any real danger. Again: we’re terribly sorry for this brief outage! Hopefully, this downtime didn’t cause too much trouble on your side.

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Since 11:45 am CEST we experience electricity supply issues in our data center. We informed the data center, their whole team is working on the issue.

Please excuse this outage a thousand times! Please visit Twitter to get updates on the issue, we’ll update the status continuously.

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Now, you can sort your tables below the tabs »Report => Time entries« and »Report => Projects«. This new feature makes it really easy to keep an eye on your most time-consuming services, your top-selling customers et cetera.

The list of all time entries can be sorted by date, customer, project, service, user, note, hours or revenue, each in ascending or descending order; the list of all project reports can be sorted by last activity, project, customer, (used) budget, hours or revenue.

To sort a list, simply click on the column header by which you’d like to sort the list. To switch from ascending to descending sorting or vice versa, just click once more. We hope this small—but frequently requested—improvement helps!

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Fast input, powerful output – those two are the top priorities here at mite. We put the last months into improving the output section, so it was about time to have another go at the input section! Et voilà: today, we’re happy to introduce four updates that’ll–hopefully–smoothen your time tracking experience.

Weekly calendar: fast forward, fast backward

Mondays aren’t the most beloved days in general, but in mite, there used to be a reason for that: if you forgot to track your hours for last Friday, you had to expand the weekly calendar to a monthly one to switch to the last week.

Mondays got better! Now, thanks to two little arrows on the left-hand side and the right-hand side of the weekly calendar, it’s a no-brainer to skip to another week. Just click those arrows to fast forward or fast backward to the next week or the last one. Then, pick the day you want to track hours on with another click.

At a glance: which days did you track hours on already, and how many?

In the weekly calendar as well as in the monthly one, you can now easily distinguish between days with and days without hours. Days with hours are displayed in a paler blue. When hovering your mouse over a single day, the total of your hours on that day will be shown as well.

Expanded input field »Hours«

We enlarged the time input field to make time frames, sums or products fit in comfortably.

Backstage: rebuilding the whole scene in Ajax

Lightning-fast! That’s the advantage of our reconstruction in non-techie speak. From today on, your browser won’t have to load the whole page including the navigation and the footer anymore when you switch to another day. Instead, it’ll only load the part of the page which really changed, the content. This reduces latency.

Plus, this paved the way for some minor improvements that weren’t possible before. The monthly calendar can now stay expanded even when you switch to another day or another week; this can be handy when you want to add time entries to a multitude of days. The form to add a new time entry can now stay open and filled with data as well; this can save some precious time if you realize that you’re on the wrong day, after you began to add a time entry by typing in some details.

Thanks so much!

Today’s updates are inspired by your feedback. So many users got in touch to tell us about their ideas on how to improve mite. Thank you, and keep it coming, please! This is really super-helpful for us.

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Who? What? Why? How? Did you know that? and What should we do about that? Yolk—the team serving mite—was all question marks during the last few weeks. And those questions kept coming, and coming, and coming. Normally, we would have stopped that immediately and would have tried to be a little more productive. This time, those question marks felt just great. They told us that we were up to something.

Every single one of those questions was a result of the new dashboards and the new information it was digging out for us. And that is exactly what we are trying to achieve: mite should be presenting data you are actively looking for, yes of course, but it should do even better: mite should distill this data to inform you. mite should help you understand your working time in depth. And it should report facts and trends. Proactively.

So here we go: curtain up, ladies & gentlemen! Meet your new dashboards – redesigned from scratch:

Features at a glance

Your new dashboards (formerly called: overview reports) feature three areas:

1. Key figures:
   • Today’s hours
   • Current week’s hours
   • Current month’s hours
2. The last 4 weeks, the last 6 months, the last year:
   • Chart: hours per day, week or month
   • Chart: hours per service, project or customer
   • Trends: comparing your hours to the preceding time frame
3. Projects with budgets over 75 %

Hours versus revenue
You can switch your dashboard from a time perspective to a financial one. If you use the hourly rates within mite and if you’re browsing mite as a co-worker or an admin, mite will not only show you which customers, projects and services you’re working on for the lion’s share of your time, but also which ones are bringing in the biggest share of your revenue.

My dashboard, team dashboard, dashboards of your team members
Tracking your time in a team? If so, mite will also show every co-worker a team dashboard. If you’re an admin, you can also access the dashboard of every single team member.

Customization
mite remembers which information you’d like to see. So, if you choose the yearly view of the team once, mite will show you this view again as soon as you return to the dashboard.

Everything is connected
All parts of the new dashboards are linked with the underlying data. So if you want to explore what’s behind a peculiar spike in a chart, simply click on it: mite will show you the corresponding time entries.

Some tech-stuff on the new charts
We said good-bye to the old flash charts! On the new dashboards, we got rid of this technology, totally. Thus, all charts can be viewed without a special browser plugin. Plus, the bonus point: you can print charts, now.

Any feedback?
We do hope you find the new dashboards useful! Please tell us if you stumble upon any bugs or if you have any feedback on how they’re working out for you. Tadaa!

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Time entries with time frames are now supported by the mobile version of mite. On the iPhone / iPod touch and on smartphones running Android or Web OS, you can now not only specify the bare number of the hours you’ve been working, but also a time frame featuring a starting and ending time.

Hence, all input options known from her big sister, the standard desktop version, are now available on smartphones as well. If you’re looking for an overview of all supported input options, please head over here. We hope you like the update, all the best with time tracking to-go!

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For over a year now, you can not only specify the bare number of your working hours when adding a time entry, but also a time frame featuring a starting and ending time.

If you want to track this additional information, just enter a time frame in the »Hours« field. E.g., enter »8 to 10« or »8 10« if you worked from 8am to 10am. mite will calculate the 2 hours then and save the starting time as well as the ending time as a note, so you’ll be able to keep that information for later reference.

Today, we improved the handling of those time frames when you export reports from »Reports => Time entries« to Excel or as a .CSV. Now, starting and ending times get their very own colums. mite extracts those time frames from the column »Notes« to separate cells. We hope that this new handling simplifies the further processing of your data!

If no single time entry in your export file contains a time frame, nothing changes for you. mite will then automatically hide those new extra columns.

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Always on the go, from the office, to a business lunch, to a conference, to a meeting, to a client’s office? Why not leave your notebook at home, and track your working hours on the go? mite is mobilizing!

Until today, mite to-go was iPhone only. Since today, mite serves a handy, simplified version to a couple of other devices as well:

• smartphones running Android,
• the Palm Pre and
• all BlackBerry, Nokia smartphones etc. browsing mite on Opera Mobile.

You don’t have to download anything from an app store. Just start your based browser and point it to your familiar login address (http://yourteam.mite.de) – done. mite detects your device automatically and serves the simplified view, optimized for a fast mobile experience. With this mobile version, you can track your hours manually or with a timer. Time entries can be edited, deleted or moved to another date.

Please note: Today’s release is a so-called beta version, which means that it’s a first approach, a test version. Of course, we did check the little sister of mite on all emulators available, but we did not check it on every single mobile device on every single operating system. There are too much combinations – it’s a jungle, honestly. Thus, design and function won’t be running 100% smoothly on every smartphone, we’ll have to assume that.

And that is exactly why we’d love to ask for your help: please tell us if you stumble upon a bug! Get in touch by e-mail, leave a comment right here on the blog or send a tweet. Any medium is perfect, but please never forget to include some information about the mobile device you are using, your operating system as well as your browser. Thanks to those details, we can find a bug much faster – and get rid of it. A huge thanks up front for supporting us!

Update, June 24th: Thanks so much for your helpful feedback! We just pushed two updates based on your comments. One, you’ll now find a link in the footer of the standard browser version as well as the mobile version which lets you switch to your preferred version. Two, in the mobile version, we changed the icon to edit a time entry. Now, it’s the crayon you know from the standard version, we skipped the »>«. Hope you like it!

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Next Monday, between 1 am and 2 am CEST (what time is that for me?), some updates to our servers will be made. Therefore, mite will be unavailable for a very brief period of time. We expect the interruption to last for no longer than 10 to 15 minutes.

Maintenance will include updating the kernels, i.e. the heart of the server systems, as well as some improvements to the hardware, i.e. server rack restructurings. This maintenance takes place to reduce the possibility of future downtimes by tackling the root of past problems. We ask for your understanding.

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