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Safeguards for Marketo Outages

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Michelle_Tang3
Level 4 - Champion Alumni

Safeguards for Marketo Outages

Hey Marketo Community! Some of you may have suffered the second Marketo outage within the last 3 months. We are so worried that this will happen again and want to be cautious and create a backup/alternative plan. Has anyone thought about this?

For the first outage, our web forms did not submit so we put in an error message on the web forms to contact sales via phone or email.

Any ideas to share would be great!

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Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

Yes! Since this is the second time in 3 months, we've put together an action plan so we can quickly remediate issues when a catastrophic failure occurs with Marketo. When Marketo went down, it severely affected our site, our salesforce, and our Google Adwords ads so our intention is immediate damage control. Mind you, our plan is pretty primitive and not sophisticated at all.

1. Use a service that tracks response time/uptime such as DownNotifier.com to track our "https://app-xxxx.marketo.com/" and "https://www.pages.ourdomain.com" so we know if access to Marketo or our assets ever goes down. I'm assuming that the forms are tied to the same server that pages are on, so if pages go down we'll know our other assets are down as well.

2. Have backup forms for all of our website forms (we use gravity forms in WordPress) and a google spreadsheet index of the locations of forms on our site, so if anything goes down we can switch it out ASAP to prevent loss of leads and site performance.

3. Have a popup bar ready that notifies visitors that our marketo-hosted assets (only our eBooks) are currently unavailable. Luckily, our brochure, client testimonials, blogs and videos are all hosted on our regular web server. Alternatively, you can index where links to Marketo content are such as a page of all your ebooks, and disable/redirect those links.

4. Double check performance on your site, if your Munchkin code is already loaded at the bottom of your page and it's slowing your load time down, go in and remove it. (find out how to remove it beforehand so you can act quick)

5. We couldn't do anything for google analytics other than disable our ads, which Google does automatically anyways if your target URL does not work. We removed Marketo Sales Insight from our Salesforce layouts so it wouldn't affect the rest of the org who are using Salesforce.

6. Pray Marketo is working their asses off to fix it.

75Mp1.gif

7. Reinstate everything once it's fixed.

Hope this helps!

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21 REPLIES 21
Darrell_Alfons2
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

I know Lawrence Mien​ replaced all marketo forms with CMS forms, so that's one back up plan you could have.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

Yes! Since this is the second time in 3 months, we've put together an action plan so we can quickly remediate issues when a catastrophic failure occurs with Marketo. When Marketo went down, it severely affected our site, our salesforce, and our Google Adwords ads so our intention is immediate damage control. Mind you, our plan is pretty primitive and not sophisticated at all.

1. Use a service that tracks response time/uptime such as DownNotifier.com to track our "https://app-xxxx.marketo.com/" and "https://www.pages.ourdomain.com" so we know if access to Marketo or our assets ever goes down. I'm assuming that the forms are tied to the same server that pages are on, so if pages go down we'll know our other assets are down as well.

2. Have backup forms for all of our website forms (we use gravity forms in WordPress) and a google spreadsheet index of the locations of forms on our site, so if anything goes down we can switch it out ASAP to prevent loss of leads and site performance.

3. Have a popup bar ready that notifies visitors that our marketo-hosted assets (only our eBooks) are currently unavailable. Luckily, our brochure, client testimonials, blogs and videos are all hosted on our regular web server. Alternatively, you can index where links to Marketo content are such as a page of all your ebooks, and disable/redirect those links.

4. Double check performance on your site, if your Munchkin code is already loaded at the bottom of your page and it's slowing your load time down, go in and remove it. (find out how to remove it beforehand so you can act quick)

5. We couldn't do anything for google analytics other than disable our ads, which Google does automatically anyways if your target URL does not work. We removed Marketo Sales Insight from our Salesforce layouts so it wouldn't affect the rest of the org who are using Salesforce.

6. Pray Marketo is working their asses off to fix it.

75Mp1.gif

7. Reinstate everything once it's fixed.

Hope this helps!

Michelle_Tang3
Level 4 - Champion Alumni

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

Thanks Lawrence! This list is super helpful! After the previous big outage 3 months back, we started putting messages on the web forms if they didn't submit and also started capturing additional data in multiple sources other than Marketo.

Has anyone received any communication from their CSM about this outage? Even an apology or reason for it?

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

Well, by definition, there's no backup plan for catastrophic service failure that will maintain the user-facing experience. 

You should have IT monitor your Marketo services (branding domain, landing page domain, instance host) every minute so you can get immediate alerts without waiting for Marketo's acknowledgment. You can then, for example, switch LP domains to a static backup page with a link to a service like statuspage.io.  (Just as you would for your corporate website.)

TTLs on your Marketo-related DNS records should be 10m max to allow for faster response.

A fallback service for branding domains is basically impossible, since you can't rewrite tracking links in emails that have already been received, and you will not have access to the original URL. If you believe Marketo to be unstable, but you are not prepared to disable campaigns entirely, you should temporarily disable link tracking in your emails so you can be certain that the person will have someplace to land.

Aslihan_Ayan_Ha
Level 7

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

If you have any integration with third-party platforms that has native form building capability, you can use their native form with API integration, instead of embedding MKTO forms directly to these platforms. In the event of a Marketo service interruption, visitors will still be able to submit forms and data will be saved in these platforms, and you will be able to bring it to your MKTO instance after the issue is resolved.

Ayan_Talukder
Level 5

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

Hmm this is a great point, we have never really thought about a backup option if Marketo goes down.

It was unfortunate what happened yesterday, a bit annoying I imagine for most. I do appreciate their constant updates on:

Marketo Status

Much better communication than the last outage. I imagine it was better this time because they actually had a domain that wasn't expired to let us see the status haha.

Rebecca_Koonse2
Level 1

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

Aside from forms, what can we do about an outage like yesterday that effected the REST API and Munchkin? Because the Munchkin is on our site, during the outage we had extremely slow page load speeds. Anyway to avoid that?

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

That doesn't make sense. If you use the Munchkin async embed code, a total Marketo outage has no effect on page load. (A network failure in the background has no effect on foreground events.)

Rebecca_Koonse2
Level 1

Re: Safeguards for Marketo Outages

Marketo lists Munchkin as one of the areas effected yesterday on their site here - Marketo Status and my IT team is saying it effected the page load speeds because the site was waiting for a response from Marketo. Is that not possible?