Is ChEMBL down or is it just me?

Have you ever wondered whether your favorite resource of bioactive molecules data is down or there is some temporary network issue, that makes it unavailable from your end? There are many online tools, that can help in such cases (for example downforeveryoneorjustme.com or similar websites). We, however, provide now a much better solution: ChEMBL status page:

http://chembl.github.io/status/

As you may notice, the status page is hosted on GitHub, so it is outside of the EBI infrastructure. This means that even when ChEMBL core websites are down, you should still be able to see the status page (assuming that GitHub is online, which is a quite reasonable assumption, despite occasional incidents). We've placed a link to the status page at the bottom of the left-side navigation menu on the main ChEMBL web page, as it provides some useful information even when everything is fine.

The status page presents information about the health of ChEMBL's most critical resources (main web interface, REST API, ADME Sarfari, SureChEMBL, UniChem and more) along with cumulative availability data grouped by time (from last day, week, month, year and all time). As you can see from the data presented on the status page, we have some pretty impressive availability rate: more than 99% for every monitored resource!

For those of you interested in the technical details - we use a service called Uptime Robot in order to collect availability data. Uptime Robot allows to define up to 50 monitors (each monitoring a single URL) - for free. It also provides an API to retrieve collected data and present/share it online without having to visit the Uptime Robot webpage.

There is a nice open source JavaScript widget called Upscuits, which provides a nice overview of data collected by Uptime Robot. Since the widget is written in JavaScript, it can be hosted on any static page friendly environment. The ChEMBL team uses GitHub for hosting our open source repositories anyway, so GitHub pages were an obvious choice.

We have been using the ChEMBL GitHub Organisation page for quite some time for mirror posts from this blog (we use Jekyll to do this) so creating another simple website with status dashboard provided by Upscuits/Uptime Robot was a breeze. We hope the new page will help diagnosing any availability issues that may occur.

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