Improve incident reporting for Google Ads API on dedicated Google Ads status page

[Robert Heise]

Dear Google Ads API team,

on September 27 and 28th Google Ads API had a major outage as reported and discussed in following forum threads:

• https://groups.google.com/g/adwords-api/c/Uwqy0BlkNDA
• https://groups.google.com/g/adwords-api/c/Gx4QN7ER33s
• https://groups.google.com/g/adwords-api/c/XUCcozWsybM
• probably more, didn't dig deeper
  

The only status page for this incident I could find is https://ads.google.com/status/publisher/incidents/TzP81sKq9EBjuSGURXSq . This reports a far shorter and less severe impact, not matching the observed behavior. It reports "Incident began at 2022-09-28 09:45 and ended at 2022-09-28 21:30 (times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC))." Most importantly it reported the issue with more than 1 day delay!

Actually the observed (observed based on our logs) service disruption began around 2022-09-27 6:00 UTC (or even earlier, this is just the time where the last report fetch succeeded terminating), until around 2022-09-27 13:00 UTC not a single report fetch was successfully ended via search_stream, then smaller reports started to be successfully ended, but larger ones didn't work until the next day 2022-09-28 21:30 UTC . Since search_stream is the endpoint suggested in all Google Ads API docs for fetching report data, I'd see this disruption as highly critical.

In my opinion the Google Ads status page at ads.google.com/status should have reported the incident far earlier and documented the steps taken on Google Ads team side. Instead of hiding these updates in the Google Ads API Forum. For most people the status page is the first source for information on service issues, not the forum.

For the next incident I request improving the incident reporting on Google side by sharing the Google Ads API issues more accurately and more promptly (with less delay) via the dedicated Google Ads status page at ads.google.com/status. The current incident had more than 1 day delay and still doesn't report accurately the time when the API service was disrupted.

Thanks,

Robert

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi Robert,
 

Thanks for reaching out to the Google Ads API team. I hope you are doing well today.
 

With regard to your request about improving the incident reporting on Google side by sharing the Google Ads API issues. Allow me to raise this issue to the rest of my team. We will reach out to you back as soon as possible.
 

Regards,

Darwin Google Ads API Team

ref:_00D1U1174p._5004Q2evBR1:ref

[Grace Angel]

+1 to this request!

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi Robert,
 

Thank you for your patience in this case your input is very valuable and we're going to share this information in the post-mortem for the incident. With this, allow me to raise a feature request for this issue. Please note that this will be subject for review and for now, you may keep an eye on our blog for any updates or announcements.