Sep 27, 2010 08:07 GMT  ·  By

Very recently, Google launched a global dashboard to indicate whether any of its services are being disrupted or are experiencing problems in certain regions or worldwide. Now it has done the same for Google Analytics, the free web traffic measurement tool it provides.

"Google Analytics processes huge volumes of data for websites around the world everyday, thanks to Google’s globally renowned infrastructure," Yi Wang from the Google Analytics Product Team, wrote.

"While we never stop focusing on system reliability and scalability, we also want to make sure our users have an easy way to get the latest updates from us should there be a problem," he added.

"Today, we’re pleased to announce that we have launched the Google Analytics Status Dashboard. Now anyone can visit this Status Dashboard to check on the current status of components of the Google Analytics system," he announced.

The new Dashboard should give an overview of the main components of Google Analytics, Data Collection, Web Report and the GData API.

Data Collection indicates whether the analytics data is being gathered correctly from the websites. The Web Report indicator shows if the users can log into their Analytics account and view the data being gathered. Finally, the GData API indicator shows whether the Analytics APIs are working.

Like with the similar Google Dashboards, there are some caveats. The data is not real-time, and is likely updated just a few times a day. What's more, it only shows global availability so it's only of use in the event of a major failure.

"The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for service availability of Google Analytics anywhere in the world," Google says, indicating that the data may be localized in some way, though.

Still, while the global Dashboard may show that everything is working properly, there may be issues locally preventing Analytics from either gathering or displaying the data at any one given time.