4 ms·

different severity levels are fine. That's what the indicator is for. Decorating the indicator, normally completely incorrectly, with a tiny extra indicator,

different severity levels are fine. That's what the indicator is for. Decorating the indicator, normally completely incorrectly, with a tiny extra indicator, is incomprehensible. That's why you've never seen a tiny red light in the upper corner of your green traffic light. Your 'check engine' light is not green with a tiny extra indicator in the corner. The metaphors go on and on. Customers are totally not interested in the fact that some other random customer may not be experiencing problems and that amazon has a wide variety of services, some of which may not be affected in certain geographies. Customers go to that panel with one express goal: to discover if the problems they are seeing with their servers could be related to them. It is a triage check. The question is not, is Amazon super great and are the availability engineers the bestest on average over time? The question is, what the fuck is going on? Amazon has suffered catastrophic unavailability, and the green-i has appeared belatedly, an hour or more into the problem. Because as revealed in this post, it is manually put up by engineers. Manually! Manually!

deanCommie 11y ago
The question of timing of the green-I is valid, but different from your original complaint. In your hypothetical scenario, the customer that is going to the panel to "find out what the fuck is going on" is not going to miss the indicator i, and will read the description of the message.
- RyanGWU82 11y ago
  It's really easy to miss the indicator "i". I've been doing this for 4 years and it still doesn't catch my eye when scanning the page.
  - deskamess 11y ago
    I agree 100%. That column of uniform green makes it easy to miss. It is a poor UI choice but can be easily fixed.
    - rstupek 11y ago
      However it is hard to miss the difference in the column with details and the more link even upon a cursory scan.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I don't care what that "i" indicator is; if you're showing green while you're impacted, your status board is useless and I'm going to Twitter and HN to see if you're broken (which is what I already have to do for AWS).
  - mgkimsal 11y ago
    When we've seen problems, some of my clients go there and see green and say "Amazon shows they're fine - it must be your code or something you did or didn't do - fix it". Well... it's green but it's not fine. And there's little I can do to demonstrate to someone that it's not code but infrastructure.

deanCommie 11y ago

The question of timing of the green-I is valid, but different from your original complaint. In your hypothetical scenario, the customer that is going to the panel to "find out what the fuck is going on" is not going to miss the indicator i, and will read the description of the message.

RyanGWU82 11y ago
It's really easy to miss the indicator "i". I've been doing this for 4 years and it still doesn't catch my eye when scanning the page.
- deskamess 11y ago
  I agree 100%. That column of uniform green makes it easy to miss. It is a poor UI choice but can be easily fixed.
  - rstupek 11y ago
    However it is hard to miss the difference in the column with details and the more link even upon a cursory scan.
toomuchtodo 11y ago
I don't care what that "i" indicator is; if you're showing green while you're impacted, your status board is useless and I'm going to Twitter and HN to see if you're broken (which is what I already have to do for AWS).
- mgkimsal 11y ago
  When we've seen problems, some of my clients go there and see green and say "Amazon shows they're fine - it must be your code or something you did or didn't do - fix it". Well... it's green but it's not fine. And there's little I can do to demonstrate to someone that it's not code but infrastructure.