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Zoho Offers Application Health Status View

Zoho wants you to know they believe in being open and transparent with their users. That's why they have added a new section to their website called Zoho Status. Now you can see at a glance the health of all those Zoho applications you use.

Zoho's Health Status Page

Zoho now offers a special page that displays the health status of all their applications. A first look provides the status of each application over the past week.

Zoho Health Status Page

Selecting the "more" link next to each application opens a section with more detail on the health of that particular application. This breakdown provides you with availability and response times for the past week, including any downtime that may have occurred.

You can also see the response times for each location where the applications are monitored. Six different locations monitor the Zoho apps including: Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany and Australia.

Zoho Health Status - Zoho Mail Details

Zoho Health Status Comes From Site24X7

This new feature isn't so new to Zoho, just to you. The functionality comes from their website monitoring service: Site24×7. A link to this site can be found in the Utilities section of the Zoho website.

The service performs monitoring checks from outside the firewall. If downtime or performance issues are found, email and SMS notifications are sent out to the appropriate people.

Didn't know Zoho knew much about monitoring? Well the capabilities come from their mother ship AdventNet and its ManageEngine business unit.

New Enterprise Version of Site 24×7

Zoho announced this week a new Enterprise version of the monitoring service. This new version still includes the monitoring of websites and applications, but new features such as defining SLAs and tracking compliance for applications has been added. In addition, you can get enterprise class reports, the ability to trace failure routes, an operations dashboard and enhanced billing.

How Does Zoho Compare Against Google

Now we know that Zoho monitors its applications 24×7 and if necessary we can see how the applications are doing in terms of availability and response times for the past week. But what else? Can we see this type of information over a longer time period? Are the applications guaranteed to be available 24×7 (or 99.9%)?

Google's terms of service for Google Apps Business Edition users ensures 99.9 % uptime for Gmail and the apps themselves with 24×7 support. Google monitors and credits customers if service levels are not met. Which we assume means some businesses got a credit several months ago, when Google started having uptime issues with its applications.

Is this Zoho's way of continuing the battle against Google Apps? No where can we find a similar "health check" option from Google. But while it's a nice thought, what does it really provide users?

The Need for Context with Monitoring Stats

There seems a need to do more than just provide this type of information. There needs to be context around it. Seeing the status for the last week gives a customer what? Knowing the response time for Seattle tells us what? What is a good response time?

The desire for Zoho to be transparent could potentially result in more support calls as Zoho app users try to understand what the data really means. Do you find this health status view useful?

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