How healthy is your BPOS service?

IT Professionals love knowing what’s going on with their stuff.  Be it that blinking light that shows hard disk activity on your laptop* or knowing that your SQL Server is running perfectly you need to know what’s working and what’s not.  With the cloud that becomes ever more important as you outsource the mundane management of your stuff you need to know it’s working. 

Well now you can with a handy dashboard!

Guest post by Simon May

Seriously though for BPOS you now can with the Microsoft Online Services Dashboard which gives you not only current service status for every part of BPOS but also historic information (for when the Gail from accounting asks why her mail was slow on September 21st between 10:03am and 1:01pm ) .  The current view is “super-green” as some ‘softies like to say but if you back to September 21 in Europe you’ll see we had a hiccup.  I love the honesty of this.  It shows the right way for cloud services to be run.

Also worthy of note is that there’s an RSS feed that you can subscribe to so you can get even faster updates, so you don’t always have to check the dash.  And your users can access the portal too, so you don’t have to recreate it internally.

*the hard disk light, what would we do without it…it’s been there for all time and it’s still the best indication that your PC is doing something, even if you don’t know what it is…it shows it’s alive or dead.  I love that little light.