As many businesses are transitioning some or more of their internal and external services to cloud, cloud incidents start having a bigger impact. The impact can range from productivity hit for employees to crippled services to customers.
There are several trackers for uptime of services like DNS, webhosting, VPS and mail. However, the concept of cloud is more towards the infrastructure view than service view. The availability metrics for infrastructure are often discussed, debated and hardly agreed upon. That puts could availability metrics to an age-old turf – more qualitative than quantitative.
There are some interesting efforts in the past like Cloutage, but they seemed to fizz out in the recent past. Even their tracking methods are status/event driven than metrics driven.
Adrian Cockcroft started tracking the cloud outage reports on his blog earlier today. He is trying to compile information based on scope and cause of the outages involved. That I think will be an interesting list to watch, till we get more concrete, metrics driven could outage reports.