Through reading Reddit and HN during this event I learned that most people apparently aren’t even aware of the existence of the PHD and rely solely on the global status page, despite the fact that there is a giant “View my PHD” button at the very top of the global status page, and additionally there is a notification icon on the header of every AWS console page that lights up and links you directly to the PHD whenever there is an issue.
The PHD is always where you should look first. It is, by design, updated long before the global status page is.
If you don’t know what the PHD is, a big button pointing to it won’t do anything. People ignore big boxes of irrelevant stuff all the time.
AWS user of ~8 years and I’ve never heard of the PHD nor this sequencing of updating it first.
Is it really? I get the value of eating your own dogfood, it improves things a lot.
But your status page? Such a high importance, low difficulty thing to build that dogfeeding it gives you small amount of benefits (dogfeed something bigger/more complex instead) in the good case, and high amount of drawback when things go wrong (like when your infrastructure goes down, so does your status page). So what's the point?
Poetry.
Then, to be fair:
> We have a back-up means of updating the Service Health Dashboard that has minimal service dependencies. While this worked as expected, we encountered several delays during the earlier part of the event in posting to the Service Health Dashboard with this tool, as it is a more manual and less familiar tool for our support operators. To ensure customers were getting timely updates, the support team used the Personal Health Dashboard to notify impacted customers if they were impacted by the service issues.
I'm curious if anyone here actually got one of these.