Service Availability and Performance

Consuming sales tax related services can be considered mission-critical, especially when making calculation queries through the Avalara for Communications products. 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 Avalara Communications service.

Network Latency

While there are no Latency Service Level Agreements available, Avalara strives for a consistent service calculation time measured in hundreds of milliseconds, not taking network or other latency issues into account.

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

If you have issues with latency when reaching Avalara’s services, try using these scripts to determine if it is a network connectivity, SSL negotiation, or some other problem. This example applies to AFC SaaS Pro REST v2, but can easily be modified for AFC SaaS Pro SOAP by replacing the URL.

Execute the following from the source machine:

For UNIX based systems:

$ export URL=https://communications.avalara.net/api/v2/Healthcheck

$ 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://communications.avalara.net/api/v2/Healthcheck)

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

It illustrates the latency of the network from the source machine to the Avalara for Communications’ servers. The first number 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 can determine the source of any network latency problems and respond accordingly. If you are still experiencing latency issues, contact Avalara for Communications Support for further troubleshooting.