Comparing Amazon Web Services, SalesForce, and Zoho's online health dashboards

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?

• Amazon Web Services
  
• Salesforce
• Zoho

What is the URL of each status page (and are they easy to remember in times of need)?

• Amazon Web Services: http://status.aws.amazon.com/ (Somewhat easy to remember)
• Salesforce: http://trust.salesforce.com/ (Easy to remember)
• Zoho: http://status.zoho.com/ (Extremely easy to remember)

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

• http://support.bluetie.com/?q=node/819
• http://status.twitter.com/
• http://www.everyone.net/main/scripts/status.cgi
• http://www.capitalserv.com/current_service_status.aspx
• http://open-systems.ufl.edu/status/
• http://www.qwk.net/network-stats/core.html
• http://status.successfulhosting.com/
  

Google Status Dashboard been brewing since August?

According to MoonWatcher back on August 27th, an email from Google explains:

"We're building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage:

1. A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact. Our belief is during the course of an outage, we should be singularly focused on solving the problem. Solving production problems involves an investigative process that's iterative. Until the problem is solved, we don't have accurate information around root cause, much less corrective action, that will be particularly useful to you. Given this practical reality, we believe that informing you that a problem exists and assuring you that we're working on resolving it is the useful thing to do.
2. A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution. Many of you have told us that it's important to let you know when the problem will be solved. Once again, the answer is not always immediately known. In this case, we'll provide regular updates to you as we progress through the troubleshooting process."

Who knew! Glad to see they aren't rushing this out the door and are (hopefully) putting in the time to do it right. Judging by the amount of thought they've already put into this email, I'm already impressed.

Google will have a challenge in presenting their myriad of services in an easy to understand dashboard. Their online services are complex, highly GUI oriented, and distributed in such a way that a small fraction of users could be down while the rest of the world is fine. My three big questions for Google are:

1. How will you be collecting your uptime and performance data? Can we rely on it to be accurate and unbaised?
2. What will be considered "downtime" for a complex app like Google Docs or Gmail?
3. How will you communicate with your users during the downtime event? Will that communication channel be easy to find?

I'm looking forward to seeing what Google comes up with. I have no doubt the release of a Google Health Status Dashboard will not only be huge news for the tech industry, but will be the tipping point that drives all serious SaaS services to offer their own status dashboard. Transparency is so close I can taste it!

Zoho opens up their kimono and the blogosphere applauds

Big news from Zoho (provider of online applications and services that compete with Google and Microsoft). As of yesterday, they have reached the next level in uptime transparency by launching Zoho Service Health Status! As Raju Vegesna states in their big announcement, "This initiative is yet another step to being more open and transparent with our users." Kudos to Zoho for recognizing the need and delivering. They join Amazon AWS and SalesForce as the three large service providers offering a very public health dashboard of their services.

I'm really excited to see that the blogosphere gets the significance of this move:

Mashable:

"One frequent problem with web applications and services - and thus the whole web 2.0 phenomenon - is lack of communication when something goes wrong. Sure, it’s nice to have your online e-mail client available from every computer, but what happens when it goes down? Often, it’s just you in the dark, waiting for problems to be resolved, with little or no official information on what’s happening to ease your mind...

This is a great idea. If something goes wrong with any one of Zoho’s applications, you can quickly check out if the problem is on your side or theirs. Of course, I’m sure that the folks at Zoho will continue to inform their customers about problems, updates, downtime and similar issues via blog posts, but being able to see what’s wrong for yourself, at any given time, is an advantage Zoho’s customers will certainly enjoy. All other web startups take notice: this is the level of transparency we’d like to see from everyone, not just Zoho."

WebWorkerDaily:

"After taking a look, I’d say that all applications hosted online could benefit from this level of kimono-opening."

CNET:

"Web application specialist Zoho has joined the growing ranks of companies willing to share detailed information on how well their online services are holding up.

This move toward transparency is increasingly important as potential customers consider relying on such services...

Publishing the performance measurements for online services is catching on as cloud computing grows more serious. Going hand in hand with that is offering service level agreements (SLAs) with specific uptime commitments."

Who's next to open up? I'm looking at you Google!