This looks very neat! Thanks! :) Also great that it's available as an RSS Feed - have really been missing a more detailed health status than the one in the administration center.

Hi,

Thanks for offering this service.

However, I think this should integrate into the BPOS Admin Centre. We already got many different admin centre login already: BPOS Admin, BPOS MOCP, admin.messaging.microsoft.com etc.

Also for APAC Health Dashboard, is the time showed in GMT+8?

Thanks

Angus

Why hide the dashboard from prospective BPOS customers?  Would be good information to have as they deliberate on whether to commit.

Quick answers to some questions:

@Mjol -- Glad you like the new Dashboard. To clarify, the RSS feed link will take you to the original RSS feed for service health information. The RSS feed is not yet hooked up to the Dashboard. That's a feature request, and I'll take your comment as a vote for our engineering prioritization list.

@Angus -- The Service Health Dashboard will integrate with the Microsoft Online Admin Center (MOAC) in a future update to MOAC. The Dashboard is imporant functionality, and we did not want to delay its release until the MOAC integration is released. The good news is that your MOAC sign-in credentials can be used for the Dashboard.

Also, the time and date of events are keyed to your browser settings. If we post an event notice at 10:00AM PDT on Tuesday, the event time/date will appear as 1:00AM GMT+8 on Wednesday, if GMT+8 is the time zone setting for your browser.

@Joseph -- the Service Health Dashboard is available to prospective customers that have a trial BPOS account. Sign up for a free 30-day trial, get your trial credentials, sign in and experience the Dashboard along with great features of BPOS.

Love the dashboard, but I feel like you missed it by *that* much: first, as @Joseph asked, why in the world would you put this behind a log in? If you want to hide it from your competitors, do you really think they can't afford the $10/month to be able to access it? I would really like all of my users to be able to access this themselves (I have them mostly trained to check a similar page to see if Salesforce is down), but only admins can access the page.

Second, I can't log into this using my iPhone. This would be immensely valuable as a first step if I'm away from a computer and a user reports a problem. C'mon guys, just open this sucker up. The dashboard is awesome, but it should not be behind a login!

This was what I was going to write before reading above that it is already planned;

While the MSOL Health Dashboard is great, it would make the most sense if it was part of the Admin Center as opposed to being a holw 'nother website to keep track of. Please integrarte this into the Admin Center.

In response to someone else concerns about iPhone and removing the login requirement, my response is if the iPhone browser cannot get you to log into it, it is probably not compatible and you will need to talk to your OEM for an update. And making it part of MOAC makes the most sense instead of opening it up. And it is mainly for Admins, not the entire list of users. If every company's users log onto it, this will overload the system and bring it down so keep it as an Admin-only feature in MOAC since users have to contact their admin anyway for any issues they may be having and the admin will check the Health Dashboard. Simple logic.

You need to extend the logon value for the console so it does not time out.  We are looking to add it as a view on a Sys Mgt display but it keeps logging the session off after a while.

The server to monitor the health of the servers is down?

awesome.

@amallano. The Dashboard does seem to have a short value for auto log off. Engineering is aware of the issue, and they are working on a fix.

@anonymous. The Dashboard is not down. I've received that error a time or two when trying to login. Go to the original login URL and try again. Second attempt works for me. And the Server Error problem has been reported.

To others points:

1. Good practrise for a Health dashboard is to provision it from a totally separate platform otherwise you end up with the circular sitution that the service is down which is when you want to check the status, but you cannot access the dashboard because.....the service is down.  Maybe MS could manage this by having the APAC dashboard provisioned by EMEA datacentres, EMEA by NOAM etc.  In the background they would then have to replicate the users accounts to facilitate login.  However given comments from paulenglis, my guess is that this is too far for this initial release.  Therefore potential for egg on face next time service is down (paul clarfication on this would be great)

2. Agree with others that the requirement to login to see the dashboard is very "on-premise" thinking.  If MS are trying to "hide" the status then why and do they really think that it will not become public anyway.  Also the removal of password access would make point 1 easier to implement: a) external web site on separate infrastructure b) link within admin console so single place to manage but with no requirement for sign on integration c) external link for direct access d) a DNS redirect process in the event that the Admin console is down.

(newleaserelease.wordpress.com)  

@SJKP

1. You are correct. Good practice  is to deploy the status/health reporting tool in a different location than the primary data center, and that has been done with the BPOS Service Health Dashboard. The primary data center for the Dashboard is the backup data center for each region. So, the Dashboard for the Americas is deployed in the backup data cetner for the Americas region. Same for EMEA and APAC.

2. Oy. The community's feathers are ruffled about the login for the dashboard. Feedback heard and recorded. The decision to make Dashboard access via login/password was made to assimilate the dashboard into the admin features of MOAC, which will happen in an upcoming release, as I mentioned earlier. There is nothing hidden in today's connected world, including BPOS service status. You guys talk, tweet, blog, and buy Facebook ads.

Thanks for all of your comments and questions. Keep them coming. @amallano, are you still having trouble logging in to the Dashboard?

Why isn't EHA included in the dashboard?

Big thanks for the dashboard! It's a step in the right direction and will second Mjol & Joseph's Feature request as a basis.

1. What is the current length of historical data stored and available for access? If it is do be continual from a few weeks back from the launch of the dashboard on, perhaps a different Historical Data navigation pane should be looked into... I.E. Separate out by Year/Mo/Week.

2. The "Current" column on the dashboard, is it static for the day or in realtime? And is it based on Server Health/Automated Monitoring or a more manual method of monitoring the service?

Anyways, those are my 2 cents and overall I'm happy with the dashboard.

@WJA: Exchange Hosted Archive (EHA) is not part of the core BPOS services, and so we did not include EHA information in the BPOS dashboard. EHA customers have access to the admin console for the Forefront Protection for Exchange (FOPE) standalone service, and EHA alerts are posted there. One consolidated health dashboard or console for all Microsoft cloud services would be great -- add that idea to the feature request list.

@CRS: Glad you like the dashboard. The information in the dashboard is fed by the Operations Team as part of the incident management processes. Little of the updating is automoated today, but that is planned for future versions.

The dashboard will always show 35-days (five weeks) of status information, including the present day. The current column will always show the latest status for the current day. Once that day rolls into the history, the status icon will display the worst case status for that day.

For example, if we report a Service Interruption (red) for Mailflow @ 9:00AM, but then report a Service Degration for Mailflow (yellow) @ 11:00AM, the current column will display the yellow icon, until another update, such as an all clear message, is posted. When the current day rolls into the history columns, Mailflow will display a red icon for the most serious status of that date.

Hope this is helpful. Will add your navigation suggestion to the feature/request list.