Which is better? How do you know whether an issue is individual to a customer or a quick blip that will resolve in a few seconds?
It’s most annoying when you have something like recently - known maintenance work on my upstream home fiber connection that was resulting in service degradation (but not complete loss, my fiber line was back to DSL or dialup). The chat lady could see that my area was affected, but the issue lookup system couldn’t.
If the issue lookup had told me there as an issue I’d’ve gone on my merry way.
I even checked a few more times until it was resolved; the issue never appeared in the issue lookup system.
Making this decision easy is a fight I fight for my customers every day. :)
Quite often you see automated tests that check how well your cache/in memory data are working. But when some other customer that isn't in the hot path tries to access their request times out. I've seen a lot of people making automated checking systems fail at things like this.