No service is a 100% available, and of course your SaaS provider’s outage always comes in the ‘worst time’, just when you have a deadline to meet… what really gets painful is when you have no information whatsoever on what just happened and how long the outage may be.  Major providers like Salesforce.com and Amazon learned the lesson the hard way, and they both released their status dashboards after extended outages and the customer uproar that followed:

• Amazon Status Dashboard
• Salesforce.com Status Dashboard

Free services rarely display such level of transparency, but that’s exactly what Zoho is announcing today: they created  Zoho Status , a monitoring service which displays the health of all Zoho Applications – currently 24. Here’s a partial screen-print:

If it looks familiar, perhaps you followed my earlier advice on using Zoho’s  Site24×7 service on your own site or even blog.  I’ve been using it for two years now, and received alerts of outages that neither I nor my service provider were aware of.

Zoho took their own tools and turned it into a public availability display, monitoring their services from six different locations: Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany and Australia. For now the display is rather “boring”, being all green.  Obviously we’re all better off if it stays that way and we have no reason to check the status site.

What makes sense, however, is to use  Site24×7 on your own site, or on any service you are dependent on (you don’t have to install anything, it’s all external monitoring).  As usual, it starts with a free level, adding extra paid services – the new addition today is the Enterprise version, allowing SLA definition, compliance tracking and reporting.

Related articles:

• Questions To Ask Before Trusting a Cloud Vendor
• Zoho Redefines Transparency With Zoho Status
• Zoho and the Cloud Stability Question
• Transparency is catching: Zoho shows status
• Zoho Status - Powered by Site24×7

(This article is cross-posted from for CloudAve, the Zoho-sponsored Cloud-Computing / SaaS / Business Blog I am editing. Subscribe to our feed here.)

Tags: Availability, downtime, monitoring, outage, SaaS, site24x7, sla, status dashboard, transparency, uptime, zoho, zoho status

It’s rare that I get into a public debate with a fellow Enterprise Irregular, but today is the day:

Michael Krigsman at ZDNet’s Project Failures cites the stellar response by Technorati as exemplary customer communication at a time of system failure that Amazon should learn from.

True, Amazon did not shine (that’s an understatement) when S3 went down earlier today. I’m sure Amazon will work on not only improving infrastructure, but communication - like Salesforce.com did after their major outage, establishing an Health Monitor, reminds us Lassy Dignan at ZDNet.

True, Technorati was exceptionally forthcoming in that particular incident - but the emphasis is on exceptionally, which is why I would not set them as role model for quite a while. Infrastructure problems have been the constant state of affairs for Technorati for years, the Technorati Monster is still at large, and most of these problems have been swiped under the carpet. In fact when they recently removed old posts from their online index without any notification, they explicitly stated they hoped most users wouldn’t notice.

I salute Technorati on their new approach to transparency, if it holds - but they are very, very far from being a role model.

Tags: amazon, customer communication, S3, service outage, technorati, transparency, web infrastructure

Just two weeks ago Technorati was praised left and right for “returning to their roots”: reinstating charts and the authority filter in search. The most telling title: Technorati Fights Off Irrelevance With Return of Charts.

Today they are back. To irrelevance.

When I first noticed I could not find posts older than 6 months, I had doubts if I tested enough, and even if I did, was the issue system-wide, and “by design” or just a glitch. Then I got confirmation from Technorati’s Ian Kallen:

We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling that have required taking some data offline. The data is not lost but our priorities are to prefer keeping recent data online. Most people don’t notice We’ll probably be bringing that data back online but I don’t have an ETA yet.

First of all, thank you, Ian, for responding so fast. Second, it’s a sad post comment: you just condemned Technorati to irrelevance. Your new CEO says:

The core of everything we do is in blog search - without question, we must do that very, very well

Hm… and the first step to providing quality search is to take the index offline… 6 months is not “remote past”, significant events were reported / analyzed by blogs, often better than mainstream media, and now they are nowhere to be found! Here’s the result of a search I performed for background to my next story: Technorati (0 results) and Google (83 results). I can’t use Technorati if it does not remember “yesterday”… and you don’t even have an ETA on restoring the index.

But the worst part isn’t the poor performance It’s the attitude: silently take it offline, hoping “most people don’t notice“. Yuck. In the age of transparency. I’m afraid Dennis Howlett is right:

@Ian: “We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling” - in other words - we’re totally messed up and are trying to figure out what to do next. That would be closer to the truth don’t you think?

Update: Any hopes of users not noticing are up in smoke: it’s on TechCrunch, TechMeme and a bunch of blogs including hyku | blog, TeleRead, Susan Mernit’s Blog, Deep Jive Interests, Data Mining, WinExtra, Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog, and The Last Podcast.

Tags: blog search, Customer Service, Google, google blog search, technorati, transparency