Google modernizing Workspace Status Dashboard, improving outage alerts for admins

Abner Li | Jul 19 2021 - 11:24 am PT

Downtime among Google’s largest services is typically rare, but it does occur from time to time. Google is now updating the Workspace Status Dashboard and other tools that admins can use to keep track of outages.

The Google Workspace Status Dashboard is getting a brand new design that is already available for Cloud products and the Maps Platform. The previous UI very much dated back to early Google web app design. It was somewhat reminiscent of the older Calendar interface.

Services are listed on the left, but the current status is now at the right edge, with checkmarks replacing green dots. These more explicit icons are more descriptive than just indicator colors. Overall, this refreshed user interface is meant to “allow you to find and view important service status information faster,” while the URL remains unchanged.

Meanwhile, the Google Admin Console will start surfacing outage notices in the Alert Center. This allows an organization to get unified issue reporting.

Existing email alerts have been tweaked to add: “structured information such as key issue details, the status of the affected services, and a link to the Google Workspace Status Dashboard.” As part of this change, admins are advised the sender email is changing from workspace-noreply@google.com to google-workspace-alerts-noreply@google.com.

The subject of these emails will not change (it will still be “Google Workspace status alert”). Any email routing or filtering based on the old sender address should be updated accordingly.

The updated Workspace Status Dashboard will be available later this week, while the other outage reporting changes will occur over the coming days.