Outages guide

Background

Payment systems are complex, typically involving multiple systems such as issuing bank, network, payment orchestrator, payment aggregator, payment gateway, and acquiring bank. Any of these systems facing outage leads to payment failure. Many of these systems are maturing and we see frequent outages.

Detecting an outage is not an easy task given the parties involved. Not many systems provide a ping API to check the health of a system. We have tried different models and adopted payment failure based outage detection.

Working of Outage API

The algorithm constantly monitors and learns the payment failures for each payment method. Outage systems maintain the score for each payment method in 0 to 1 range and with two stages: FLUCTUATE and DOWN.

When any particular payment method sees a high number of failures back-to-back and it crosses FLUCTUATE threshold, outage API starts showing that payment method with FLUCTUATE, and when it crosses DOWN threshold , outage API starts showing that payment method with DOWN.

Outage system keeps score at global level (across merchants) to consider high number of failures at global level and make outage decisions. This helps when at merchant level, we don’t have enough transactions to make an outage decision.

Features

Global information - across merchants
Granular - detects bank-wise outages
Two stage outage - Fluctuate, Down
Near real-time - detects outages as early as it happens and accurately
Configurable - you can define fluctuate threshold and down threshold based on your business needs

Levels at which outages are tracked:

1. CARD - At Card Network <> Bank Level
2. Net Banking - At Bank level
3. Wallet - At Wallet level
4. UPI -
a. At Transaction type level - UPI COLLECT, UPI PAY, UPI INAPP
b. At vpa handle level (for UPI COLLECT) and at app level for (UPI PAY)
c. At Issuing bank level & NPCI level - This is a premium feature and requires additional enablement at Juspay level

How to access outage response:

In /paymentmethods API call, set options.add_outage to true. If any outages are present in the payment ecosystem, the information will be shown to the merchant in the outage block of the API response

For issuing bank & NPCI level outages for UPI, post enablement at Juspay level, set options.add_upi_outages to true in the /paymentmethods API call. If any outages are present in the issuing bank level or NPCI level for UPI payments, the outage information will be shown to the merchant as part of the outage block of the API response

How to access outage information

In the /paymentmethods API call set options.add_outage flag to true. If outages are present it will be shown to the merchant in the outage block of the API response

To recieve issuing bank level & NPCI level information for UPI, the options.add_upi_outages in the /paymentmethods call needs to be set to true (post enablement at Juspay for this feature)