I was working on a SharePoint site in Office 365 recently when the site became unresponsive. <Click> count to 10 <click again> count to 10. The site was so slow it was unusable. I dd the normal troubleshooting routine:
- Is my computer performing well? Yes
- Is my Internet connection congested? No
- Does the Office 365 Service Dashboard say anything is wrong? No
If an outage isn’t on the dashboard, is it an outage?
At this point I have no idea what is wrong but this is the beauty of Office 365 and other cloud applications, I don’t have to fix it.
I contacted Microsoft Support and went on with other tasks. After 20 minutes or so I tries SharePoint again and it was working fine. To be honest, I wasn’t really upset about the outage. It was aggravating but not the end of the world.
Then Microsoft Support called …
The support engineer was polite and helpful. Apparently there had been an outage and SharePoint was inaccessible for a period of time. I said that I had checked the Dashboard and it didn’t say anything about an outage.His response was …
So, an outage occurred that affected customers but it remains unreported because it wasn’t a big outage? That makes me start to think …
- According to the Dashboard, Office 365 almost never has issue but how can I trust that now that I know they don’t report short outages?
- If Microsoft does not acknowledge the outage, how can I make claims against my SLA if I need to?
- How big does an outage have to be to be reported?
Mostly I am upset because I need honesty from my application providers. I need to know when something is wrong on their end so I can stop troubleshooting things on my end. By not telling me there is, or even may be, a problem they are wasting my time. This is something I will bring up with my Microsoft representative but I suspect nothing will come of it.
Before I buy another cloud application I am going to want to see their historical dashboard records and then I am going to search the web for outage reports. If I find under-reporting on the part of the vendor, I am going to pass on their services.
This post was updated 9/10/2014: Added the response from Microsoft.
Decomplexification 