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Only future reservations now, which take a very long time to schedule?

rich21
Level 1
Level 1

While I don't want to conflate multiple questions into a single post, it seems like they're so related that it might we wise here.

1 - Reservations seem to be scheduling multiple weeks into the future.  It used to never be this way, but now it is.

Q1 - Is this a temporary problem, or is this lack of resources going to be the new status quo?

2 - In order to schedule a lab, there's a 2 minute, 28 second delay in the system (I have video, and I've timed it a few more times) before it gives me an option on when to schedule it.  If that's not suitable, it takes another minute for the next option to display.

Q2 - Is it supposed to take that long for it to find the next available time slot?

3 - Picking a duration, then waiting 2:28 for it to tell you it's not available and would you like a timeslot weeks from now, then trying to go back and pick a shorter duration (thinking maybe there are earlier timeslots available for 4 hours vs. 3 days?), repeat - Oh god the tedium.

Q3 - Is there a current schedule available? Or at least some way to find out if there are smaller slots available earlier, or maybe some date/time I missed on the lab that says "earliest reservation available on April 24th" so I don't have to keep playing the waiting game with your scheduling algorithm?

-Rich

 

7 Replies 7

yawming
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Is this regrading Sandbox reservation ? May I know which one ?

Yes, Sandbox reservations.

Two at the moment: 

1) Packaged Contact Center Enterprise 12.6, which if I recall correctly the earliest I could schedule it is for right around the end of April (the 29th?)

2) Collaboration 12.5, I believe earliest scheduled time was the 19th?

(I cannot confirm these dates/times because nothing in the scheduled reservation tells me this.  Both in fact say "Status Available" which is clearly not the case)

 
 

Popular sandbox may not be immediately available. I just went on, I could reserve both of them in next week. I updated my reservation, so they won't be occupying the queue. You may like to try again.


Popular sandbox may not be immediately available.

So I take it then that the answer to my original question 1 (is this normal?) is "Yes, this is the new normal".  (Contrast with the last 20+ times over 4 years I've spun these labs up, where you just click the button and ... 20-30 minutes later it's up and running.)

 


I could reserve both of them in next week.

Yes, it appears there are now some slots open next week. After 12 minutes and 42 seconds of waiting for 4 different length-of-time attempts and the 5 times I also "load additional times" (and NOT including time spent reading or clicking, just the waiting!) I have managed to snag a time frame that's not over my night, and isn't on Easter Sunday.

I guess my original question 3 about a schedule being available - that wouldn't be easy given the concurrency etc... Still, it might be not impossible to just have a list we could click on.  "Earliest reserveable time slot is Apr 9th at 4:52 PM through Apr 11 at 7:33 PM."  Someday, one could hope...

And lastly, original question 2 (is 2 minutes waiting per click normal and expected) - I'm still waiting on this.  I think I've now documented the typical/average times I've been seeing - so is that normal and expected?  I'm not looking for a canonical official answer, but has this been how it's been since the last updates/upgrades?  Did it take 2 minutes for your attempts too?

Anyhow, thanks for checking into it.  It's a very frustrating *set* of problems.  Any one of these solved would make the overall frustration go down immensely.  If you can click and it fairly quickly tells you that scheduled time isn't available, or if the resources were added to just not make this an issue, or if you could see the time slots that are available and just pick one.  But all three of those together... argh. 

 

Update, and some tips.

The "find next open time" portion of the reservation algorithm is indeed slow.  There are no solutions here except for Cisco to fix that, or to plan your labs out a few weeks in advance when there's no contention.  There's no way to see what's available without just trying it, and the more popular labs not having immediate [lengthier] timeslots available seems like the new normal.

But maybe the tip below will help:

Any lab you reserve, once started, may be able to be extended.  In the upper left click on the "Sandbox" dropdown, select "Extend" and try adding some time to it.

You won't know if you can until you try, but at LEAST that interface lets you know within seconds, so it's pretty fast and easy to just try adding 2 days or 1 day to your 8 hour reservation.  So if, say, an 8 hour lab might work but it would be better for it to be longer, get the 8 hour, then you can try to extend it later.

And from memory, they're usually pretty good about allowing labs to be extended once started, if you ask here in the forums.  I'm not sure of all the specifics there, there may be some caveats about how "hard" you are using them etc... but mostly when folks ask to extend a lab for a few days or a week or two, they'll do it for you.

(The update here: I had one scheduled starting last Easter Sunday for 2 days, 8 hours so it'd run through at least most of Monday and Tuesday which worked well enough. But it tried to start, never sent the final email, and then shut down before I even got to work Monday.  So I started an 8 hour lab early Monday, which worked, then decided hey - that original time slot's probably still available so I tried to extend it another day and it worked - and when I tried to add two days it failed *immediately* instead of after 2 minutes, and when I tried to add 1 day, it completed successfully immediately, too, so that was way better..)

I may have gotten a clue as to the nature of the "2 minutes, 30 seconds" for it to find availability. I got these when trying to extend a lab beyond where it was available -

rich21_0-1681250502226.png

Is it possible the items I can't see and can't access have to time out before the process can continue?

Is this something fixable now that it's been pointed out?

mack29
Level 1
Level 1

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