TrustSaaS uptime monitoring, alerting and reporting for SaaS (eg Google Apps, Salesforce)

Putting the Trust in Software as a Service (SaaS)

TrustSaas.com is an uptime monitoring and alerting service ('SaaS Weather Report') for Software as a Service (SaaS) run by an independent third party. It checks service status every 60 seconds (over 500,000 times per service per year), instantly alerting subscribers of problems by email and/or SMS. TrustSaaS records downtime with the highest resolution possible and response times are also analysed. This information is included in monthly reports delivered by email to subscribers, allowing them to make comparisons between providers, monitor end-user experience, verify Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance and trust that SaaS is delivering on its promises.

For more information about how SaaS is Changing the way we work™ contact Australian Online Solutions.

Calendar Up 171 days, 6:07 2 minutes, 36 seconds ago	Gmail HTTPS 3 minutes, 27 seconds ago	Gmail IMAP Up 154 days, 13:26 3 minutes, 24 seconds ago	Gmail POP3 Up 69 days, 10:36 3 minutes, 22 seconds ago	Gmail SMTP Up 154 days, 3:54 3 minutes, 21 seconds ago	Google Sites Up 8 days, 9:24 2 minutes, 35 seconds ago	Google Talk Up 71 days, 3:01 2 minutes, 34 seconds ago	App Engine Up 104 days, 6:17 2 minutes, 33 seconds ago
AP0 Instance Up 3:34 3 minutes, 20 seconds ago	EU0 Instance Up 3:34 3 minutes, 11 seconds ago	NA0 Instance Up 3:34 2 minutes, 56 seconds ago	NA1 Instance Up 1:30 2 minutes, 53 seconds ago	NA2 Instance Up 1:30 2 minutes, 52 seconds ago	NA3 Instance Up 3:31 2 minutes, 49 seconds ago	NA4 Instance Up 4:06 2 minutes, 46 seconds ago	NA5 Instance Up 3:30 2 minutes, 46 seconds ago
Facebook Up 1 day, 12:36 2 minutes, 34 seconds ago	MobileMe Up 39 days, 6:45 2 minutes, 35 seconds ago	MySpace Up 8 days, 0:06 3 minutes, 19 seconds ago	Twitter Up 18 days, 6:16 2 minutes, 35 seconds ago	TypePad Up 9 days, 4:32 2 minutes, 39 seconds ago	Wordpress Up 28 days, 16:22 2 minutes, 38 seconds ago
Basecamp Up 10 days, 21:32 2 minutes, 43 seconds ago	Backpack Up 25 days, 22:30 2 minutes, 42 seconds ago	Highrise Up 14 days, 21:07 2 minutes, 40 seconds ago	Campfire Up 25 days, 22:30 2 minutes, 41 seconds ago

Frequently Asked Questions

Administrative

What is the mission of the TrustSaas site?
The site was created to allow all SaaS users to see how their provider(s) are performing over time, to be alerted when there are problems and to receive detailed reporting information. It is particularly useful for system administrators who need to know about issues before their users do, and for managers to ensure their users are able to work effectively. We strongly believe that SaaS and utility computing in general is the way of the future and endeavour to overcome adoption hurdles by showing empirical evidence that SaaS solutions are as good as (and usually better) than in-house solutions in terms of performance and availability.
What are the benefits of becoming a TrustSaaS Premium Subscriber?
Although the basic services are available for free as a community service, all SaaS users should consider subscribing in order to avail of the following:
- SMS Alerting within minutes of an outage so you are the first rather than the last to know about it.
- Email Alerting for those who prefer not to be interrupted by SMS.
- Monthly Reports to show you detailed performance metrics for your providers (including uptime % and response times).
- Premium Support to ensure that you and your monitoring service is supported in the unlikely even of problems.
- Feature Requests including suggestions for new SaaS providers are prioritised (and often promptly implemented).
- Contribution to a project which benefits the community by making uptime monitoring information available.

How do I become a TrustSaaS Premium Subscriber?
You can use the link below to subscribe to TrustSaaS and a technician from Australian Online Solutions will follow up with you to deploy your service on the distributed monitoring and alerting systems (which are completely independent of this site), typically within 24 hours. The rates are USD100 per provider (for all services) per year.

How do I get premium subscriber support for TrustSaaS?
Premium subscribers should open a technical support case to get support.
Can you help me with my specific/custom monitoring needs?
Yes! Although TrustSaaS is tailored for SaaS users we can also implement uptime monitoring for other SaaS and legacy systems.
What other products and services does Australian Online Solutions deliver?
Australian Online Solutions delivers a wide range of products and services throughout Australia, Europe and the USA, including:
- Google Enterprise products including Google Apps and Google Universal Search/Google Search Appliance
- Salesforce.com and associated products and services
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) from other market leading vendors
- Strategic Consulting for direction setters (management and technical)
- Legacy Integration which bridges the gap between SaaS and existing systems
- Training and Support for users and administrators
Who are your clients?
We work with some of the largest organisations in Australia, Europe and the USA, typically with thousands or tens of thousands of users.
How long have you been providing uptime monitoring services?
We have been monitoring legacy systems (Microsoft, Linux, Unix) since our foundation in 1998, started monitoring SaaS in 2006 and launched TrustSaaS in 2008.

Technical
1. What are the possible states for a given service?
  There are three possible states for services which are:
  UP: Responding appropriately and in a timely fashion
  DOWN: Failing to respond appropriately or at all when tested from two or more geographically separate probe servers
  UNKNOWN: The service is not yet configured (as is the case for most services during deployment), or that monitoring information is for some reason (typically temporarily) not available.
2. When do you consider a service to be down?
  If a web page is not reachable, returns an error, or takes longer than 30 seconds to load, it is considered as down. Downtime is always confirmed from two geographically separate locations.
3. How do your checks work and how thorough are they?
  This depends on the application and protocol(s) in use, but they are typically as thorough as they can be without risking triggering false positives. Usually this means retrieving a page and looking for a login form, authenticating as a test user (Gmail SMTP), checking for a sensible answer (POP/IMAP) or simply completing the TCP 3-way handshake (Google Talk). Where possible (eg Google Sites, Wordpress, App Engine) we have set up test accounts/applications and look for specified text (eg a random cookie) in the response.
4. Why do you connect over SSL/TLS given this can significantly increase the response time?
  We are extremely security conscious and believe that encrypted SSL/TLS connections (the logical equivalent of VPNs in legacy infrastructure) are a critical component of SaaS solutions and as such almost all of our checks first setup an SSL/TLS session. Note that while this artificially inflates the response time (session setup is a resource intensive task and response times running into the hundreds of milliseconds are possible), it does so universally. Please bear this in mind when making comparisons with other monitoring statistics.
5. Why is uptime information only available for some sites?
  We don't list uptimes for sites that have been up continuously since TrustSaaS was launched. Uptime information will automatically appear after the first outage.
6. Why don't you take planned outages (maintenance) into consideration?
  In our opinion a 'planned outage' is still an outage - we don't have regular 'planned outages' for electricity, water and gas and if our vision of ubiquitous utility computing is to be realised then these services need to be always available, just like your telephone dialtone.
7. Where are you monitoring from?
  The monitoring servers are located all over the world in secure locations with excellent Internet connections. Only the best hardware available is used for maximum reliability and the servers and infrastructure are also monitored. The last batch of checks were done using servers in the following locations:
  - Amsterdam, Holland
  - Berkeley, CA, USA
  - Dallas 2, TX, USA
  - Dallas 3, TX, USA
  - Houston 2, TX, USA
  - Montreal, Canada
  - Reading, England
  - Stockholm, Sweden
  - Vasteras, Sweden
8. If you are checking every minute why does this site say otherwise?
  The distributed monitoring and alerting system operates completely independently of the main site for performance and availability reasons. As this is a high volume site we aggressively cache statistics which are refreshed every minute. This is why reporting is uninterrupted and alerts are still sent even in the unlikely event that this site is down altogether. If the results are more than an hour old you can open a support case.
9. Can you please add site X or provider Y to the list?
  That depends primarily on whether the service is of interest to the average SaaS user. 500,000+ checks per service per year are not free and TrustSaaS is not an advertising service so typically the process is to subscribe and submit a feature request to support who will follow up with you directly.