Service Availability and Performance

Service Availability and Performance

Consuming sales tax related services can be considered mission-critical, especially when making calculation queries through the AvaTax product. As a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service provider, Avalara understands the need to ensure that our services are available continuously and respond in a timely manner.

Avalara’s Server Status can be viewed publicly at http://status.avalara.com. This page outlines the availability of the service, current performance in terms of response time and a historical view of the availability for the past week.

Network Latency

There are no Latency Service Level Agreements available.

The speed of a typical round-trip API call will depend on a number of factors, including network topology, number of hops from source to destination, (de)serialization algorithms, and others.

All service calls are made using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which inherently will add more latency to each call due to certificate management and authentication processes.

If you have issues with latency when reaching Avalara’s services, you can try using the following scripts to determine if it is a network connectivity, SSL negotiation, or some other problem.

Execute the following from the source machine:

For UNIX based systems:

$ export URL=https://development.avalara.net/tax/taxsvc.asmx
$ for i in `seq 1 5`; do curl -w "tcp: %{time_connect} ssl:%{time_appconnect}
" -sk -o /dev/null $URL; done

For Windows systems:

C:>or /l %x in (1,1,5) do @(curl -w "tcp: %{time_connect} ssl:%{time_appconnect}
" -sk -o /dev/null https://development.avalara.net/tax/taxsvc.asmx)

This is a sample of the result from the test script above:

tcp: 0.049 ssl:0.220
tcp: 0.048 ssl:0.219
tcp: 0.047 ssl:0.220
tcp: 0.048 ssl:0.221
tcp: 0.047 ssl:0.220

The response illustrates the latency of the network from the source machine to Avalara’s servers. The first number in each row is the response time it takes to make a quick ping using plain TCP and the second making a ping with SSL negotiation turned on.

With the combination of the Avalara’s Server Status website and the script provided, you should be able to determine the source of any network latency problems and respond accordingly. If you are still experiencing latency issues, please feel free to contact Avalara’s Customer Service Department for further troubleshooting.