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Platform Availability Communication Management (PACMan)

Introducing PACMan—an information communication API.

Overview

API downtime occurrences can be unpredictable and unavoidable. However, there are instances where we expect outages to occur for regular maintenance and/or upgrades, and for these, planned outage notifications are beneficial and valuable. PACMan ensures you receive platform availability notifications for entitled APIs. The PACMan API can be polled to retrieve any planned/unplanned outage information and the time frame for which they will face a downtime. With additional details, such as endpoints and HTTP methods, the API provides accurate information relative to API unavailability.

PACMan's partner bank outage reporting capability enables you to retrieve the status of a partner bank. You can query using the partner bank ID, filter on status (online/offline), or get statuses of all partner bank availabilities.

Use this API to retrieve information for:

Platform availability notifications and updates.
Details on planned and unplanned outages.
Time frames for outage downtimes.
Unavailability status of partner banks.

Benefits

Real-time access to critical information
Proactive incident management
Minimized operational downtime
Improved business continuity planning
Data-driven decision making

When to use PACMan

Planned outages

Internal systems can have downtime for periodic upgrades that can result in API unavailability.
Periodic server maintenance can also result in unavailability of the API platform.

Unplanned outages

Partner banks and clearing houses can face outages that affect the availability of Payment APIs.
Network bottlenecks can cause API responses to be stuck/delayed, triggering an unplanned outage.

Partner bank outages (U.S. RTP)

The U.S. RTP API enables you to receive webhook notifications and check the status of partner banks. An API response/callback is coupled with an email notification that indicates when a partner bank is having an outage and when the outage has been mitigated.

Partner banks and clearing houses can face outages due to technical issues.
Payments can be rejected if clients initiate transactions to a bank that is experiencing an outage.

How it works

The Architecture Flow Diagram below shows the sequence of events for the Platform Availability APIs.