Google: You Can See Paradise By The Dashboard Light

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Posted by Snehsan

Green for go, yellow for slow down, red for stop: Google's new Dashboard feature lets users check the status of a range of Google Apps services. The new Dashboard service comes on the heels of Google's recent Gmail outage , and is part of Google's Premier Apps service. The Apps Status Dashboard is in a table format and features a green check mark for no reported issues, a yellow wrench icon for a service disruption, a red "x" mark that indicates a service outage and a blue icon that provides available information. In addition to Gmail, the Dashboard indicates the status of other Google Apps services such as Google Calendar, Talk, Docs List, Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, and Google Video for Business. Administrators for organizations such as schools can check Google Apps performance from the administrative control panel as well. Google's mea culpa fix follows Tuesday's two-and-a-half hour outage that primarily affected subscribers of Google's Premier Edition, which is aimed at businesses and provides Google Apps, including Gmail, for $50 per user account annually. The glitch was traced to a problem with routine maintenance performed in one of the company's European data centers. A Google spokesperson said the problem was out of the ordinary, since there is usually no disruption to the service because accounts are served out of another data center. To smooth ruffled feathers, Google offered affected customers its apologies and a 15-day credit.