Google has added status update functionality to their Status Dashboard of the Google Cloud Platform, acknowledging that even small interruptions can cause issues with users and businesses and lack of information pertaining to what’s going on only adds to the problem. This new transparency helps to improve their current tools and services, such as Google Cloud Monitoring, which monitors the health of a service. As such, Google hopes that these augmented services will help to make disruptions more manageable by presenting users with the latest information on all issues as well as the ability to help find workarounds to these issues.
Google has added status update functionality to their Status Dashboard of the Google Cloud Platform, acknowledging that even small interruptions can cause issues with users and businesses and lack of information pertaining to what’s going on only adds to the problem. This new transparency helps to improve their current tools and services, such as Google Cloud Monitoring, which monitors the health of a service. As such, Google hopes that these augmented services will help to make disruptions more manageable by presenting users with the latest information on all issues as well as the ability to help find workarounds to these issues.
Launched in May of 2010, the Google Cloud Platform is a paid cloud computing platform designed to offer businesses the same supporting infrastructure that Google uses for products such as Google Search. It is also comprised of a line of products, each of which incorporates a web interface, a command-line tool, and a REST API. Some of these include Computer Engine, their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS); App Engine, their Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS); and Cloud Datastore, which provides users with a managed, NoSQL, schemaless database for storing non-relational data.
The new status update feature is fairly straight forward: When a disruption occurs, it is reported on the dashboard with a red bar and will remains as such until the disruption is resolved. In addition, the current status of Cloud Platform services is shown by the column of indicators on the right side of the graph. If the indicators are all in green, this signifies that all services are operating at normal levels. Users can also inspect the status history of each service. Though the dashboard will only show the status of the last seven days, the View Summary and History option indicates all incidents reported over the past 90 days.
As another handy feature, users can stay up to date by subscribing to the Status Dashboard RSS feed with the link located at the bottom of the Status Dashboard page. Additionally, Google has integrated reporting of Cloud Platform service incidents in the Cloud Monitoring events log, which allows users to view incidents alongside your other dashboards and monitoring data. Google notes that during beta, they are reporting status for seven services, which are aggregated across all regions.
