Stay informed about Autodesk Cloud services with the Health Dashboard

Autodesk Cloud Based Services & AWS

Autodesk Cloud services are hosted on the US Amazon Web Services (AWS) . All web based services can have interruptions from time to time, despite the use of redundant systems in datacentres and other infrastructure. These interruptions can range from a total outage to a reduction in performance or access to some features.

There was a major outage of servers on the East Coast of the US on the 8th December 2021 that caused access issues and reduced services to users of the Autodesk Cloud services such as BIM360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud. It should be noted that these AWS issues affected a wide range of cloud based vendors such as movie streaming services and even fast food outlets.

Know about outages in (almost) real time:

The Autodesk Health Dashboard was established several years ago to act as a central point of information for users of Autodesk Cloud based services to find out about any outages or reductions in service.

Whilst it is not instantaneous, Autodesk does update the page rapidly to reflect any issues with parts of their Cloud Service as well as rapidly offering updates to reflect resumptions of normal services.

The killer feature on the Dashboard though is the ability to subscribe to real time notifications about any interruptions and resumptions of the service.

Here is a screenshot of the Status report for BIM 360 Collaborate during the last outage.

Subscribing to the Dashboard:

To subscribe to dashboard simply click on the blue button labelled “Health Subscription” on the top right hand of the webpage. Then log in using your normal Autodesk account login (your work email and password).

Tweaking the Dashboard settings:

A nice feature is that once you signed in to the Health Dashboard (or when you set up your subscription for the first time), you can choose which notification for specific services you want to subscribe to.

Click on the Health Subscription button to gain access to a drop down that allows you pick “Yes” to subscribe to service or “No” to not subscribe. This means you can get rid of a lot of unnecessary services that you don’t use in your Dashboard.

Now you’ve chosen which services your subscribed to, you’ll get email notifications for any them that are experiencing reductions in service or outages sent to your Autodesk Account email address.

On the actual Health Dashboard portal, look out for the 3 symbols to denote the status of each service:

Just as importantly as getting notifications of outages, you’ll get notifications when full services are returned.

Lastly, you will also get notifications of planned outages. These can be required for upgrades of the service or maintenance tasks. Autodesk usually tries to do these out of hours but it is good to know whether you might have an issue accessing a service on the weekend if you need to do some work on a Project.

Summary (getting on my Soap Box)

My advice is, if you are using any Autodesk Cloud services in any shape or form then you really need to subscribe to this Dashboard.

That way you get notifications via email automatically and if you are responsible for a Team or office of Autodesk Cloud users then you can hopefully pre-empt a flood of distress emails and you get a heads up of any planned disruptions so you can plan accordingly.

Hopefully though, your life will be filled with green ticks 😉