3 ms·

Here's what real transparency looks like

5 points by snewman 15y ago

sdfjkl 15y ago
The basecamp page (http://basecamphq.com/uptime http://basecamphq.com/uptime) tells me at a glance what sort of service I'm getting. The scalyr page (https://www.scalyr.com/monitor 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 15y ago
  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!
pors 15y ago
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-directory/ http://www.transparentperformance.com/status-dashboard-direc...
- snewman 15y ago
  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/ 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-anomalies.html. http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-latency-ano...) 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 http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/07/cloudsat.html.
jes5199 15y ago
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.

5 points by snewman 15y ago

The basecamp page (http://basecamphq.com/uptime http://basecamphq.com/uptime) tells me at a glance what sort of service I'm getting. The scalyr page (https://www.scalyr.com/monitor 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 15y ago
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!

pors 15y ago

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-directory/ http://www.transparentperformance.com/status-dashboard-direc...

snewman 15y ago
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/ 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-anomalies.html. http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/three-latency-ano...) 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 http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/07/cloudsat.html.

jes5199 15y ago

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.