CONCEPTS
Status Page
A public or private dashboard that communicates the current health of services to users.
Status Page
A public or private dashboard that communicates the current health of services to users.
"Are you down?"
A Status Page is the billboard for your system's health. It answers the user's question: "Is it me, or is it you?"
The Anatomy of a Status Page
- Current Status: Big Green "All Systems Operational" or Red "Major Outage".
- Incident History: A log of past incidents and postmortems.
- Component Status: API, Web, Mobile, Payments, etc.
Public vs. Private
- Public: For customers. "We are investigating an issue." (Vague but reassuring).
- Private: For employees. "The Redis cluster in us-east-1 is OOMing." (Detailed).
Trust
Never lie on your status page. If you are down, say you are down. Users respect honesty more than fake "100% uptime".
ExThe AWS Outage
"A major cloud provider had a region-wide outage, but their status page showed all green for 2 hours."
Impact
Twitter exploded with angry users mocking the "Green" status page while their servers were down.
Resolution
The provider apologized and fixed their status page automation (which was hosted in the broken region!).
Why Status Page Matters
A Status Page is the single source of truth during an incident.
Transparent communication builds trust, even when things are broken.
Common Pitfalls
Silent Page
Forgetting to update the page. Assign a "Comms Lead" role whose ONLY job is to update the status page.
How to Use Status Page
📢
Over-Communicate: Update every 30-60 mins during outages.
🤖
Automate: Link to monitoring to auto-update status.
🔒
Private Page: Internal view for employees.
Related Terms
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I host my own status page?
No. Host it on a third-party (like Atlassian Statuspage or BetterStack) so it stays up when you go down.