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Ask HN: Anyone else getting a 500 on their Google Calendars?

 3 years ago
source link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29482573
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Ask HN: Anyone else getting a 500 on their Google Calendars?
I don't think status pages are so easy in practice. Me and everyone I know have not had any problems with google calendar today, so who is right? Together we're probably <0.001% of all google calendar users so I don't think our sample is very representative.

Presumably there is some internal threshold for when to flick the switch on the service dashboard, but without knowing anything about the scale of the outage or what the threshold is we're kinda shooting in the dark.

That's why you see the orange color instead of red. To indicate that 1. The survive is not fully functional, or 2. The service is not functional for some regions. And I've seen some companies add comments to each status to explain what's going on.
I'm sure the statuses are being very liberal at their reporting thresholds towards the end user. /s

Perhaps it would help if the dashboards gave a tiny inkling of transparency, like what the thresholds are so you could gauge the relative significance of your personal service outage. If my page is out and vendor shows green, then maybe those relying on my service ontop of vendor won't believe me as much when I pass blame to them and/or maybe the vendor isn't even aware of the issue, so I should contact them because I'm an edge case.

If my service is out and the status page shows red with a nifty "were working on it" I can very clearly show anyone I report to or who is dependent on my service the parent service outage causing the issue, maybe even link them to it. In addition, I know that I don't need to contact the vendors support because they're aware of the issue and actively working on resolving it. I'm sure their support staff will appreciate it that millions of people can avoid contacting their support service reporting the same outage and having to repeat the same information through more costly reporting mechanisms than a page everyone can simply observe.

Every power company I've been with for at least the past 10 years basically do this. If I'm out at work and come home to no power, I first load my power company's outage report site (service status dashboard). I check my area and magically I know if the power company is aware and likely working on it, I can even see their updated time estimates when service will be restored. Sometimes they even tell me what caused the issue (oh boy, information). I never even have to make a call.

Meanwhile if I'm sitting here sipping coffee and hear a loud noise down the street, power is out in the middle of the day and I look across the street and see the neighbor's interior lights on, check the power company's outage map and don't see it: I give them a call. Tada, I know my isolated outage will be addressed and the service provider is aware of the issue. I also know if it looks limited, I'm probably going to be a lower priority if there are multiple outages and limited maintenance staff, so I can sort of expect it may be several hours. I can head out and not waste my time and effort sitting around.

Let's treat critical internet service infrastructure (that's what 'cloud' wanted to be, so let them have all that entails) like we treat other critical service infrastructure. It works quite well.

The underlying issue I see is that my utilities are well regulated and watched over so there often is a lot of transparency about what's going on. Heck, they even have public hearings if they want to increase their prices. Meanwhile, private company offering some service isn't very regulated and has every incentive not to let you know to manage the perception of their image and reliability vs providing empirical actual data. So will we see any sort of transparency? I doubt it, just as I highly doubt the size of represntative truthfulness of any data they report.


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