At Bastian Solutions, we continually strive to provide superb customer service at the highest standard, and not only reactive but proactive support. Transparency is a key component in helping achieve this objective and with that in mind, we are providing a full root cause analysis for the disruptions in service on March 4th described below.
 

Summary:

4:03 PM EST
J&N Electric notified Bastian that the Static and Auto Manifest were not printing for UPS.

4:10 PM EST
Support Specialist I logged into the site and was able to reproduce the issue and started reviewing the logs.
The support specialist I suspected there was a hardware issue related to the printer. The printer was not showing online and would not do test prints from windows.
When they connected to the 2nd station, the printer at this station was online and did print when test prints were attempted.  Support Specialist I then attempted to print a UPS label using static Manifest and received the same error message.

4:22 PM EST

Support specialist I reviewed the logs and saw they indicated a communications error.  

5:10 PM EST 

Bastian reach out to our escalation resource, Support Analyst I, at this point.  After consulting with escalation.  He began troubleshooting the issue in the connectship application.  We did not see any errors in connectship but we did see that the connect console application was none responsive when we first attempted to start it up.  After going through the console and verifying there were no errors. We restarted the connectship service to try and re-establish communications.  
Support Specialist I and our Support Analyst I also checked the uptime on the server and it had been online for 40+ days.  This too was thought to be a contributing factor

5:27 PM EST

Support Specialist I called the site back to have them test after restarting of connectship.   The same error continued to manifest.  At this point we requested a maintenance window so that a server reboot could be performed.

5:50 PM EST
Reboot was completed and services started back up.  Manifest was tested, with the same results. The issue was escalated to the Software Support Manager, Travis Coleman. Troy Taylor was consulted, the site informed us that he had recently made some updates to Bartender Label printing services, and we wanted to rule that out as to the cause of the issue.

6:30 PM EST
Escalated to Software Development Manager. Development resource was assigned and assisted with the installation of COM+ Components.

7:05 PM EST
Received confirmation from site issue was resolved

Root Cause:

ExactaManifest COM+ Components were corrupted and DNS issues. AutoPack was unable to resolve the server by name.

Resolution:

Static Manifest: Uninstalling and reinstalling the ExactaManifest COM+ Component.

AutoPack: Changed the COM+ Client to point to IP vs server name.

Next Steps and Preventive Actions:

J&N IT to investigate DNS issues.

Our commitment to you:

Bastian Solutions understands the impact of the disruption that occurred and affected operations for your organization. It is our primary objective in providing our clients with superb customer service and we assure you we're taking the required preventative measures to prevent reoccurrence.