Dashboard shows customers Google Apps' health
Google has fulfilled a promise to share with Google Apps users--notably paying customers--if the online services are working or not.
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The day after a 2.5-hour Gmail outage, Google has launched a promised Google Apps status dashboard to better communicate with customers whether their online applications are up and running.
When a needed service fails, people can be mollified--and can better plan what to do--if they hear what's going on and, what went wrong, and when the service will return. To this end, sites such as SalesForce.com and Amazon Web Services offer dashboards that show how well their services are functioning. Now Google has followed suit.
"The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it's also relevant to users of our consumer products," said Tessa Prescott of the Google Apps sales team in a blog post Wednesday. "Customers can use this Status Dashboard to check on the current service status of individual services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video for business."
In the case of the recent Gmail outage, Google offers information about when the problem was discovered, the status of its repair, and a detailed postmortem of what went wrong.