

Here's what real transparency looks like - snewman
http://blog.scalyr.com/2012/01/03/transparency-in-cloud-services/

======
sdfjkl
The basecamp page (<http://basecamphq.com/uptime>) tells me at a glance what
sort of service I'm getting.

The scalyr page (<https://www.scalyr.com/monitor>) doesn't (even after three
glances). The sort of data presented there may be useful in diagnosing
problems, but the presentation is ill suited to tell me if "service is bad" at
a glance.

I'd favor a service that offers both, with a high-level "basecamp" overview
that offers the option to get the "scalyr" details when I need to.

~~~
snewman
Agreed: the Scalyr page is very much a work in progress, and the presentation
leaves much to be desired. Look for improvements in the fairly near future.

Thanks for the feedback!

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pors
Web site/service transparency is barely something new, have a look here for
over 300 sites that have a public status page in some form:
[http://www.transparentperformance.com/status-dashboard-
direc...](http://www.transparentperformance.com/status-dashboard-directory/)

~~~
snewman
Thanks for the link. This ia a great resource I hadn't encountered before.

It's true that some sites provide some sort of status blog or dashboard --
more, I now see, than I'd realized. However, most of them provide very little
information -- often no more than "service is currently [up | down]". A few go
so far as to publish some sort of graphs (e.g. Twitter, Google App Engine),
which is refreshing, but even here the amount of information provided is
fairly limited.

Third-party monitoring (e.g. <http://api-status.com/>) is another interesting
angle. There is more that could be done here, but ultimately the best
information can only come from the service provider themselves. (As a hobby,
I've been doing some monitoring of AWS and Google App Engine for the last 18
months, but have not done much to make the results accessible. I've
occasionally blogged about it, e.g.
[http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-latency-
ano...](http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-latency-
anomalies.html.))

Another approach would be crowdsourcing -- users of a given service could band
together to aggregate performance measurements. I discuss this idea in
<http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/07/cloudsat.html>.

------
jes5199
If you're going to name a post "this is what [thing] looks like", consider
including some screenshots, or graphs, or visual data of some kind.

