Now that there are three major
SaaS players offering online service health dashboards, and one from
Google on it's way, I thought it would be a useful exercise to compare the offerings from
Amazon Web Services,
Salesforce, and
Zoho. This will hopefully be helpful for anyone planning to launch their own health dashboard, and to the general online community in making sense of what is important to understand about these dashboards.
Disclaimer: If I have mistakenly misrepresented anything, or if I missed any information, PLEASE let me know in the comments below.
What providers are we looking about today?What is the URL of each status page (and are they easy to remember in times of need)?What are these status pages called?- Amazon Web Services: "AWS Service Health Dashboard"
- Salesforce: "Trust.salesforce.com - System Status" (Note: salesforce.com goes beyond simply providing system status by also providing security notices, both under their "Trust.salesforce.com brand")
- Zoho: "Zoho Service Health Status"
What services' health are reported on?- Amazon Web Services: All four core services (EC2, S3, SQS, SimpleDB), plus Mechanical Turk and FlexPay. They also break out the two S3 datacenter locations (EU and US), the two ends of a Mechanical Turk transaction (Requester and Worker), plus the EC2 API.
- Salesforce: Only the core salesforce.com services across 12 individual systems (based on geographic location and purpose).
- Zoho: All 23 Zoho services are covered, plus their mobile site and their single sign-on system.
What health information is provided?- Amazon Web Services: Current status, plus about 30 days of historical status. Status is determined to be one of "Service is operating normally", "Performance Issues", or "Service disruption". "Information messages" are occasionally provided.
- Salesforce: Current status, plus exactly 30 days of historical status. Status is determined to be either "Instances available", "Performance Issues", "Service disruption", or "Status not available". "Informational messages" are also provided on occasion.
- Zoho: Current status and the response time for the past hour, in addition to historical uptime for the past week. Also provided are two graphs representing uptime and response time for the past seven days. If that wasn't enough, current uptime and response from six geographical locations is also given.
Where does the uptime and performance data come from?- Amazon Web Services: No clue.
- Salesforce: No clue.
- Zoho: Their own "Site 24x7" monitoring service.
What is considered downtime and what is considered a performance issue?- Amazon Web Services: No clue.
- Salesforce: No clue.
- Zoho: No clue.
Are real time updates provided during downtime events? Is it easy to find?- Amazon Web Services: Yes, but unclear how consistently and how easy it is to find that information.
- Salesforce: Yes, right underneath the current status.
- Zoho: Does not appear so, but if the issue is big enough they may update customers through their blog.
Is information provided on past downtime events?- Amazon Web Services: Yes. Mousing over a past performance or downtime event brings up a chronological log of events that took place, from detection to resolution. In addition, major downtime events are explained.
- Salesforce: Yes. Clicking on any past event brings up a window giving the time of the event, a detailed description of the problem, and a root cause analysis.
- Zoho: No. Unless they are described in the blog.
Is there a way to easily report problems users are having?- Amazon Web Services: Yes, clicking the "Report an Issue" link.
- Salesforce: No, other then using the standard support channels.
- Zoho: No, other then using the standard support channels.
How can you get notified of problems (without watching this page 24/7)?- Amazon Web Services: Ability to subscribe to RSS feeds for change in status of each service.
- Salesforce: No.
- Zoho: No.
Conclusions: The best practices for online service health dashboards are still being formed, and it's clear that each service provider has approached the need for transparency differently. Amazon Web Services provides a simple and easy to understand overview of the health of each service, but provides little insight into who is impacted and what specific functionality is down.
Salesforce provides clear insight into what customers may be affected by an event, but does little in offering insight into specific functionality that may be down or slow.
Zoho provides the most data by far for each service they provide, but does not have a system in place to communicate details about specific downtime events beyond the company blog. Amazon and
Salesfroce completely lack insight into how that they collect the health information, and all three give no information on what is meant by downtime or
performance problems.
A closing questions for each provider:
- Amazon Web Services: What does "EC2 API" actually mean? Which API is this referring to and why not cover the API's for the other services?
- Salesforce: Does each server status cover every application level and API on that server? Can you offer more insight into specific services?
- Zoho: Do you expect to add details about current and past downtime events to the health dashboard? What do you expect your customers to do when they see a red light? If you answer "Email Support", you don't get the power of this status page.
- To all: How is the health actually monitored (especially for the GUI focused Salesforce and Zoho services? Working at a (the best) web monitoring company, I know how hard it is to monitor complex web applications.
Notable mentions: The following services also offer up health dashboard page, but to keep the comparison from getting overly complex I decided to leave them out. If anyone would like me to review these, or any other service that I missed, I'd be more then happy to. Just leave a note in the comments
