Why do ISPs want to provide free consulting advice to debug why a government map turned red today? If it is like Zonealarm or Netmedic, most of the "alarms" are due to problems with the customer's application. If the government map is designed properly then it won't turn red unless 75% of the ISP maps have turned red. In other words, a proper national or international alarming system will average out the data from several ISPs according to some kind of weighting formula so that one or two red ISPs will only contribute to a light yellow indicator on a national scale. Although an aggregated flow of information from outage reports would be useful to a national Internet status monitoring group, it would be far more useful for every ISP to report a regular red-amber-or-green status. This is qualitative information that the national group could consolidate using a weighting system that rated each ISP according to how important their network is within the big picture. Yes, it is likely that there would be errors in the weighting system but as some experience is gained with the system, that weighting can be tuned. As far as NANOG is concerned, we could help by setting up systems to report overall health according to a consistent red-amber-or-green system and we could help by ensuring that we do have an outage list (or high level stream of trouble tickets) that could be offered to a national status monitoring group. We could also help by suggesting the weighting that should be applied to various ISP networks in calculating a national traffic light report on Internet health. I anyone is interested in discussing this further perhaps we could get together in Eugene to discuss it. -- Michael Dillon