Broken…or not? Give me data.

So yesterday Google’s Gmail service (and Blogger along with a few other services) went down for a short period of time.

The way the Net responded, it seemed darn close to the zombie apocalypse being upon us.

Trying to get fast status information was hard. I set about trying to get some data to answer a very critical question; did I break Gmail??!!!

Turns out I didn’t.

Google managed to break itself; Official Blog: Today’s outage for several Google services

I found a few handy resources for reference next time.

• Google Apps Status Dashboard - Google

This handy tool provides great data on the service availability status of most of the key Google applications.  It doesn’t provide a lot of detail (granularity limited to “no issues”, “service disruption”, or “service outage”). However it does give clear feedback on what’s going on.

You might get lucky finding info on the Official Blog for Google.

Once we cleared that hurdle, I popped over to the Is It Down Right Now? Website Down or Not? site.

Their dashboard provides a lot of availability data across a wide range of web-services. Including Mail.google.com - Is Gmail Down Right Now?

You can check out the comment threads to get the pulse of what is happening in the service you are interested in.

Of course there is also the Down For Everyone Or Just Me -> Check if your website is down or up? site. I’ve found it handy as well.

In a non-related note, I recently popped in to my Google Analytics dashboard to check some stats for this humble little blog and found Analytics had completely been re-designed (again). I was lost for a little while, but the new UI is fairly intuitive. With some poking around and check-ins at the help center, I was finally able to drill down to what I was seeking.

• Google Analytics Official Website – Web Analytics & Reporting
• Analytics Blog - Google
• Analytics Academy - Google
• Analytics Help - Google

Cheers.

Claus V.