Awesome Tools - Down Detector
There is a great blog called Transparent Uptime. Sadly, it hasn't been written to for well over a decade, but the message is clear. Organisations need to be open and transparent about their uptime, or to put it less positively, their downtime.
Down Detector makes transparency a given for large national and international services. It allows users to log problems and reports the volume of issues in real-time. Localised issues, which are probably more likely to be a problem at the client end, show up as noise on Down Detector's charts. A proper problem will show up as a large spike. In fact, it's a useful tool in any incident manager's arsenal - especially if you depend on the successful operation of ISPs, cloud providers etc.
So you might as well be open about your issues, because someone's going to find out in a hurry anyway.
When looking for new vendors, one of the first things I look for is their status page, which should be available without needing a login. I look for the frequency of outages, but more importantly, how quickly they resolved them and the detail in the root cause analysis. I would much rather pick a vendor that can openly and willingly explain the problems it's having, and what it's going to do better next time, over a vendor that hides the truth. In the end it comes down to trust.
You should also take the time to look for and read outage explanations from big vendors. They are a useful resource. Consider it a form of knowledge-sharing within the IT world. After all, isn't competition healthiest when it's based on the value of our services, rather than whether we're able to keep them up and running?
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