A status page shows uptime and incidents. Update it during outages and planned maintenance. Use a third-party service or self-host; integrate with monitoring. Reduces support load and sets expectations.
Why a status page
- Transparency: Users and customers see current status and history. Reduces "is it just me?" and support tickets. Builds trust when you communicate proactively.
- Expectations: During an outage, a clear message ("We are investigating…" or "Resolved") sets expectations. During planned maintenance, announce in advance so users know when to expect impact.
- Metrics: Many status pages show uptime (e.g. 99.9%) and incident history. Use this to hold yourself accountable and to share with enterprise customers or SLAs.
What to show
- Overall status: Operational, degraded, outage, maintenance. Keep it simple and accurate. Update as soon as you know.
- Components: Optional breakdown (e.g. API, dashboard, login). Helps users understand scope (e.g. "API is up, dashboard is degraded").
- Incidents: List past incidents with title, time, duration, and summary. Post updates during the incident (investigating, identified, fix in progress, resolved). After resolution, write a short post-mortem or summary if appropriate.
Integration and updates
- Monitoring: Integrate with your monitoring (Pingdom, UptimeRobot, custom checks). Automated status can reflect real checks (e.g. HTTP 200 from health endpoint). Do not rely only on automation—human confirmation for outages avoids false positives.
- Updates: During an incident, post updates every 15–30 minutes even if just "still investigating." Silence is worse than "no change." Use a template or runbook so the on-call knows what to post.
- Channels: Status page is the source of truth; optionally push to Twitter, Slack, or email for subscribers. Keep the status page updated first.
Self-host vs third-party
- Third-party: Statuspage.io, Better Uptime, etc. Hosted, often with monitoring integration and subscriber notifications. Good for small teams; subscription cost.
- Self-host: Cachet, custom page, or static site updated by script. Full control; you own availability and updates. Ensure the status page itself is highly available (different provider or region) so it stays up when your main service is down.
Summary
A status page shows uptime and incidents. Update it during outages and planned maintenance. Use third-party or self-host; integrate with monitoring. Reduces support load and sets expectations.
