By Elmer on February 27, 2009

Last Tuesday’s Gmail outage made me realize how important Google Apps are to me (Gmail, Documents, Spreadsheets, etc). Gmail supplanted all the other email accounts I used because it stored large amount of files, has an intuitive way of displaying message (known as threads or discussions) without occupying too much space because Google is generous enough to share more than 7 GB of storage data for each account. So when Gmail hits some bug and operation grinds to a halt, many people would panic.

Now Google is has released its Google Apps Status Dashboard. It’s not a tool that helps minimize downtimes but it monitors the status of applications. Sometimes when Gmail doesn’t work, the problem could be traced to our local network and not from Google servers.

Through the Google Apps Dashboard page, a list of Google Applications and their daily status are posted. A check signifies normal operation and there are no current issues. A carpenter tool symbol means there is a disruption in service while if there is a red X symbol, the application is not working. Explanations of certain issues are also posted through the “i” symbol. The dashboard keeps record of the past 10 days so we can figure out if an application has
experienced problems in the past week.

However, whether we refer to this dashboard or not. It is important that we make backups of our files on our local drive without relying too much on Google. After all, even if it’s big and mighty, sometimes it can’t cope with the massive amount of users that put its resources to the limit.

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