Zoho Status: All Hosted App Providers Should Take a Lesson
November 11th, 2008 (2:45pm) Samuel Dean 3 Comments
Among the providers of online hosted applications that appeal to web workers, I don’t know of any players who provide quite as diversified sets of tools as Google and Zoho. As noted at Mashable, Zoho has now launched a new service called Zoho Status, designed to show uptime and performance metrics for all of Zoho’s individual applications.
The metrics Zoho provides are quite detailed. After taking a look, I’d say that all applications hosted online could benefit from this level of kimono-opening.
The main Zoho Status page displays an aerial view of response times and downtime details for Zoho’s portfolio of online applications. On an average day, the downtime report won’t be of much use, but if you do find an application down, it’s nice to be able to see whether you’re the problem or Zoho is.
The response time metrics are very useful, and by clicking on the “More” links to the right of each listed application, you can drill down. The reports show the response times for various locations around the globe, from Seattle to Singapore to Australia. I also like the graphs showing response time history over the past several hours. This can give you a sense of when a web application that you may use frequently will perform the best.
Zoho doesn’t do the underlying monitoring itself, but relies on metrics tracked by Site24×7.com. As I mentioned in a previous post, Advent/Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu says that JavaScript performance boosts in the Firefox 3.1 and Google Chrome browsers are poised to have a profound impact on performance for applications such as Zoho’s.
As these new browsers speed hosted applications up, Vembu says they may even lead to more types of new features in online applications. These types of improvements, along with the new Zoho application metrics, will allow people using hosted applications to get a real feel for the performance they’re getting. That’s a good thing for web workers, and the level of disclosure Zoho is providing is a model that all online application providers should follow.
Tags: web apps, zoho, Zoho Status
3 Comments Post your own comment
dobes says: November 11th, 2008 9:25pm
I think these third party monitoring sites are great. I’ve been using pingdom with some success; like site24×7 it also allows me to publish a public site with my response times and downtime on it.
I haven’t quite figured out where to put that information, however – we only have one site and if it’s down, people are unlikely to have our pingdom page bookmarked.
It is nice to have something to compare to – my response times are definitely not as good as they are getting at Zoho; I might look into why that is.
Lenny Rachitsky says: November 12th, 2008 11:20pm
Glad to see you understand the significance of this. Looks like the rest of the blogosphere agrees and understands the significance:
http://www.transparentuptime.com/2008/11/zoho-opens-up-their-kimono.html
Thursday evening linkdump « Authsider says: November 13th, 2008 12:10pm
[...] Zoho Status. Das ist Transparenz, die man sich von IT-Dienstleistern – egal ob für Services in der Cloud oder klassiche Hosting-Services wünscht. (via) [...]