Salesforce.com publishing real-time system status

Reacting to complaints about service outages, Salesforce.com has set up a new website, trust.salesforce.com, that reports real-time system availability for each instance of its systems worldwide.

The site reports historical information for the past month. For example, in North America, on February 16, the status reads,

Time: 6:28pm PST

Category: Service Disruption

Detail: The NA1 system experienced a disruption in service due to the failure of a hardware server in our cluster. a manual restart restored availability.

Root Cause: At 6:28pm PST, a primary hardware server in our cluster failed and one of our North American (NA1) servers did not automatically recover. This required a manual restart of the NA1 database, which completed at 7:30pm PST.

Although not a substitute for maintaining expected service levels, broadcasting the current system availability can go a long way toward satisfying customer demands for information. Salesforce.com's move to make this information publicly available, even to non-subscribers, is to be applauded, and I believe this sets a precedent for other on-demand providers. If on-demand computing is to take hold, this level of transparency is needed.

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