Zscaler Digital Experience detects degradation
At 6:05 PM PST on August 8th, 2022, Zscaler’s Digital Experience (ZDX) monitoring solution saw a substantial unexpected drop in the ZDX score for Google services across the globe. Upon further analysis, we noticed 500 and 502 HTTP Response Code errors with response times up to 40206 ms highlighting a Google degradation. The ZDX heatmap clearly details the impact on a global scale. ZDX customers can identify service issues and quickly isolate them, to provide IT teams with confidence in the root cause. This way, any reactive tickets getting opened would already have the resolution, thereby not impacting mean time to resolve (MTTR) and first response time (MTTD).
Zscaler’s Digital Experience dashboard showing Google.com global issues
ZDX Score highlights Google.com degradation
A ZDX Score represents all users in an organization, across all applications, all locations, and all cities. You can see the score on the ZDX Admin Portal dashboard. Depending on the time period and filters selected within the dashboards, the score will adjust accordingly. The ZDX Score is based on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 100 (highest) with the lowest numbers indicating a poor user experience.
In further analysis, you can see the ZDX Score for the Google.com probes drop to ZERO during the approximate service degradation of one hour. From within ZDX, service desk teams can easily see that the service degradation is not a single location or a single user, and get to root cause analysis quickly.
ZDX Score indicating the degradation and recovery times in Google Services
In the ZDX dashboard, you will also see ‘Web Probe Metrics,’ which highlight the impact of reaching Google.com across a timeline with response times. In this case, the response times increased to 40206ms with 500 and 502 errors. 500 errors mean that the server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling the request. 502 errors mean the server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, had an invalid response from another server.
ZDX Web Probe metrics indicating 500 and 502 errors
As we realize the impact is across multiple users, it’s always a good idea to check if there is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) issue. ZDX ISP Insights is an easy-to-leverage site to display ISP outages across a global map. As you can see, there isn’t a global ISP issue.
According to online sources such as Bloomberg and International Business Times, more than 42K users received 500 and 502 errors while trying to leverage Google Search. These are the same errors that were indicated from the ZDX dashboard.
Source: Bloomberg
Users took to Twitter asking how to Google ‘Is Google down’ without Google.com?
Source: Twitter.com
Zscaler Digital Experience successfully detected a degradation in Google.com, along with its root cause, giving our customers the confidence it was not a single location, their networks or devices, averting critical impact to their business.
Try Zscaler Digital Experience today
ZDX helps IT teams monitor digital experiences from the end user perspective to optimize performance and to rapidly fix offending application, network, and device issues. To see how ZDX can help your organization, please contact us.
