ANNEX VISupplementary provisions
ANNEX VI Service levels 1. National systems shall fulfil the following minimum level of service: 1.1. They shall be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 1.2. Their availability shall be monitored by a heartbeat message issued from the central hub. 1.3. Their availability rate shall be 98 %, according to the following table (the figures have been rounded to the nearest convenient unit): An availability of means an unavailability of Daily Monthly Yearly 98 % 0,5 hours 15 hours 7,5 days Member States are encouraged to respect the daily availability rate, however it is recognised that certain necessary activities, such as system maintenance, require a down time of more than 30 minutes. However, the monthly and yearly availability rates remain mandatory. 1.4. They shall respond to a minimum of 98 % of the requests forwarded to them in one calendar month. 1.5. They shall respond to requests within 10 seconds. 1.6. The global request timeout (time within which the requestor may wait for a response) shall not exceed 20 seconds. 1.7. They shall be able to service a request rate of 6 messages per second. 1.8. National systems may not send requests to the TACHOnet hub at a rate exceeding 2 requests per second. 1.9. Every national system shall be able to cope with potential technical problems of the central hub or national systems in other Member States. These include, but are not limited to: (a) loss of connection to the central hub; (b) no response to a request; (c) receipt of responses after message timeout; (d) receipt of unsolicited messages; (e) receipt of invalid messages. 2. The central hub shall: 2.1. feature an availability rate of 98 %; 2.2. provide to national systems notification of any errors, either via the response message or via a dedicated error message. The national systems, in turn, shall receive these dedicated error messages and have an escalation workflow in place to take any appropriate action to rectify the notified error. 3. Maintenance Member States shall notify other Member States and the Commission of any routine maintenance activities via the web application, at least one week before the beginning of those activities if technically possible.