PrismPOS Stability Updates
We are aware that many customers are experiencing frustrating issues when using our system to process credit cards and 3rd party debit interfaces.
We know there's never a good time for transactions to be down; our goal as an organization is to bring our stores and their customers closer together, and any outage or delay has the opposite effect.
All of that is to say, this is a critical issue for us.
Over the last several years we have been making modifications to PrismPOS to help us detect, diagnose and prevent these occurrences.
Some of our past changes in this effort have included
Adding retry logic to Shift4 transactions: When PrismPOS believes a transaction has failed, it will check invoice status with the processor and retrieve the good token if it exists. If the token is not received, PrismPOS will send a reset message to the pinpad to clear any open sales, and also send a void message to ensure no payment was captured, reducing the risk of a double charge.
Adding support for Microsoft Application Insights: These application insights capture, report, and group errors. This gives us a view of common errors across all sites. Customers can assist us in this effort by allowing outbound communication in their networks.
Sales Reconciliation Tools: Sometimes completed sales are not imported into PrismCore, which can cause confusion at the end of the day when totals don’t match up. We have added tools that allow PrimsPOS to view which sales successfully imported into PrismCore, what sales day they are being counted toward, and fix inconsistencies by re-sending sales and applying the correct date.
Heading into rush, we have even more coming your way with our August release.
Shift4 Retry change
In reviewing transaction logs, it became clear that Shift4 retry logic was not always functioning as intended. Specifically, when POS believes a credit card transaction failed because the communication between customer server and cloud has faulted, we will now rebuild that communication link to the cloud.
Intermittent Outage Issues
For a while we have been tracking a problem where many customers at the same time will see “No connection to POS server.“ errors when processing credit cards. We believe we have finally identified a maintenance job that is causing this behavior. In this release, we will be testing disabling of this maintenance job.
With those changes in place, we will continue to actively monitor. Additionally, we are working on new changes to improve our reliability as well as accelerate our ability to safely roll out improvements.
After rush we will be focusing our efforts on the following improvements for future releases.
Environment Rework
After rush, we will begin the process of eliminating virtual machines from our cloud infrastructure and leveraging Microsoft’s serverless solutions. This will reduce the potential for environmental issues to create problems for customers.
Phased Deployments
We have identified a need to implement the concept of early releases into the PrismPOS deployment process. This new phased release pipeline will allow us to deliver fixes faster and more frequently to customers and turn on new features with less risk to stores.
NBC Transfer Replacement
We will be designing and implementing a simplified, modern communication link between registers, pin pads, PrismCore/Mosaic and our POS cloud servers. This new transfer service will streamline our data transfer process and simply the environment to reduce the opportunity for lost data between products
Please visit this page in the future for frequent updates and additional information.