PIAC’s Role and the New Committee Year
The July meeting began the new 2026-2027 PIAC cycle, with several new members joining the committee. As a reminder, PIAC is a customer-driven committee with direct Clarivate involvement to raise concerns, trends, and experiences from across the Polaris community. This includes support, hosting, billing, communications, and issues being discussed through IUG forums or other community channels that may not otherwise be visible to Clarivate.
System Down Procedures and Outage Communications
The group continued its discussion about the correct procedure to follow when a hosted system appears to be unavailable. Customers should first check the Status Page to determine whether Clarivate has already identified a broader service disruption. Customers are encouraged to subscribe to their services so they receive notifications about outages, performance issues, planned maintenance, and service restorations.
When a system down issue is identified (widespread system unavailability; production system is down; connectivity to a client preventing library operations) create a support case with a priority of System Down and provide the affected product, environment, error messages, and contact information. Customers who cannot create a case in the Support Center should make contact via phone or email. If the status page does not reflect the disruption or updates are not being provided, customers should open or escalate a case and call the appropriate support channel. The iiisupportescalation@clarivate.com email address is an additional escalation option to interact with the management team for resolution.
Clarivate is also working on clearer, more consistent update intervals for the Status Page when outages do occur and are being worked on.
Bot Traffic and Hosted Performance
PIAC raised concerns about automated web traffic affecting system performance and the extent to which hosted customers are expected to make their own infrastructure-level decisions to mitigate bot traffic. Members asked Clarivate to provide a standard hosted configuration that limits malicious or excessive traffic without unnecessarily blocking legitimate patrons and integrations.
Clarivate said it is developing a broader enterprise solution for its hosted Polaris and Sierra environments. The work includes Cloudflare, Cisco, and changes to the network architecture. Some components have been built and are being tested, but Clarivate does not have a firm implementation date.
In the meantime, individual incidents may still require coordination among support, cloud, and customer teams. Clarivate also plans to invite technical staff to a future PIAC meeting to explain the approach and implementation roadmap.
Known Issues Portal Review
PIAC reviewed approximately 30 entries that appeared on older known-issues lists but were not included in the new portal. Many had been resolved before Polaris 7.8, which was the cutoff date for inclusion in the new portal. Some were also closed because they could no longer be reproduced, or were determined to be individual configuration problems rather than product defects.
The new automated process should provide better tracking when an issue is fixed, closed, or designated for no further action. Product and engineering staff now review issues before they are published, reducing the likelihood that local configuration problems will be presented as general defects. PIAC shared requests for a portal-wide keyword search. Clarivate has shared this feedback with the team responsible for the portal.