Google weasels out of uptime promise? Not so fast

Correction, 4:05 p.m. PST: The name of the senior product manager for Google Apps was misspelled. It is Rajen Sheth. Also, Pingdom had an incorrect number for total downtime in its "more likely" scenario. It is 55 minutes.

Pingdom argues Google can get away with more outages because smaller ones fall between the service level agreement gaps.

(Credit: Pingdom)

Pingdom, a company that monitors Web site availability, has concluded that Google gives itself a lot of wiggle room in its service level agreement for its Google Apps service.

The service level agreement (SLA) gives credit to paying customers if the service falls short of promised availability--99.9 percent measured monthly for Google Apps. Pingdom points out that because Google only counts downtime periods that last at least 10 minutes, the company could get away with intermittent problems that are shorter.

"What if Google Apps was down for 9 minutes, up for 1 minute, down 9 minutes, etc.? That would mean 54 minutes of downtime each hour, but Google still wouldn't count it because none of the individual downtimes lasted 10 minutes (or) more," according to a blog entry Thursday. In a "more likely" scenario with outages lasting 3, 8, 12, 5, 9, 14, and 4 minutes, the total of 55 minutes of actual downtime would only be counted as 26 minutes for purposes of the SLA.

Google, while concerned about uptime, isn't as concerned about the SLA terms or what it called Pingdom's "hypothetical scenario," though.

"If you look at our SLA and compare to others' in the industry, it's identical," said Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, pointing as an example to Microsoft's hosted Exchange service. Service providers need to set a threshold somewhere "to distinguish between a real outage and intermittent errors," he said, and Google is trying to be transparent about where it sets its.

That may sound like dodging the question about an accumulation of small outages, but the company does have a point that a blip probably shouldn't count as much as a catastrophe. Realistically, shortening the interval would probably squeeze Google on the other end to lower its 99.9 percent uptime commitment or perhaps raise its $50 per user per year price. There's no free lunch here for customers.

And after all, although SLAs are important, customers will rapidly abandon ship if a service breaks, credit or no credit.

Notably, Google monitors not only each customer account's uptime, but also each user of that account. It also gives credits even if only part of the service goes down while other parts are available, Sheth said. And though only some customers were affected by a significant Gmail outage in August, Google offered SLA credits to all Google Apps customers.

Google has promised a better dashboard to inform customers about outages. "During the times when we've seen outages, the No. 1 thing we need to do is communicate with our customers," Sheth said.

[bonesbautista]

Whatever, Google. It's not just the outages - notifications that the server isn't available, the password's incorrect don't count? <Rant> Daily issues and failures today and every day this and last week for my Premier accounts finally did it for me.

I can see owners of free accounts not having too much of a legit gripe, but I bought into it. Great spam filters just don't cut it for me anymore. </Rant>

[AppleSuxLeo]

I heard they are cutting back on bean-bag chairs , dry cleaning , and child care service.
Oh , the humanity !

[honorable1]

Google, please dry up and go away.

[jeffyablon]

SLAs . . . one of my favorite topics. Kinda like when an OCR program claims to have 99.9% accuracy. Well, that's one error in each 1000 characters, or two per page. Lotta editing time FINDING those!

I advice my ISP clients that they shouldn't give customers an SLA, and instead explain how silly they are and that their intent is to honor their commitments, instead.

Are you listening, Google?

Jeff Yablon
President & CEO
<a href="http://answerguy.com">Virtual VIP</a>

[davelaurello]

From the customers? point of view, what is the difference between a ?real outage and intermittent errors?" Their service is down either way. If this discussion illustrates one thing, it?s that availability is an illusive pursuit that very few IT service providers ? internal or outsourced ? or technology suppliers do well ? claims to the contrary notwithstanding. As a consequence, the companies that make up our industry are working hard to dumb down discourse on the subject and to set service expectations below what customers have a right to expect. The assertion that one provider?s SLA is identical to others? in the industry is an only excuse for keeping the bar low, or dodging the fact that they are ill prepared to deliver what they claim they can with their current solution. Either way, the customer loses out. If we had conducted our relationship with customers in such a fashion instead of committing to five nines availability -- no ifs, ands or buts -- Stratus Technologies would have been out of business long ago.