Status Page (Public)

A public status page is an out-of-band site that communicates the current and historical health of your services. It summarizes availability, ongoing incidents, planned maintenance, and component-level impact so users know what’s happening without opening a support ticket.

What it shows

  • Overall status: “Operational”, “Degraded”, “Partial outage”, etc.
  • Components: e.g., Website, Admin, Checkout, API, CDN, Payments, Search.
  • Incident timeline: Investigation → Identified → Monitoring → Resolved, with timestamps.
  • Maintenance windows: Scheduled tasks with start/end, impact, and regions.
  • Metrics & history: Uptime %, latency, error rate; 30–90 day history.
  • Subscriptions: Email/RSS/webhooks for incident and maintenance updates.

Why it matters

  • Reduces inbound tickets during incidents.
  • Builds trust via transparency and clear expectations.
  • Helps meet SLA/contractual notification requirements.
  • Provides a canonical source for comms and post-incident reviews.

Architecture & data flow

  • Out-of-band hosting: Host on a separate provider/region from your main site so it stays up during outages (e.g., status.example.com).
  • Automated inputs: Pull from uptime checks, synthetic transactions, TLS/DNS monitors, and error rates.
  • Manual controls: Let on-call staff create/update incidents and override component states.
  • Versioned history: Keep immutable logs for audits and SLA evidence.

Communication best practices

  • Post within minutes with clear user impact, not just internal metrics.
  • State the next update time (“Next update in 30 minutes”).
  • Use consistent severity levels and templates.
  • Close with remediation and prevention actions (post-incident summary).
  • Localize timezones; keep language plain and non-defensive.

Implementation tips for website support teams

  • Model components to match real dependencies (Origin, CDN, Images, Admin, Checkout, Payments).
  • Auto-open incidents when quorum failures occur; auto-close only after stability windows.
  • Integrate alerts with Slack/Email/SMS; allow customers to subscribe per component.
  • Prewrite templates for investigation, identified root cause, and resolution.
  • Keep DNS TTL low for status. and back it with a static site/CDN for resilience.
  • Separate access paths (SSO + break-glass account) so you can update during auth/provider issues.

KPIs

  • Time to first status update (TTFSU).
  • Update cadence during incidents (e.g., every 30 min).
  • Subscriber count and incident open rates.
  • Ticket deflection (tickets vs. incident views).
  • Uptime by component and SLA attainment.

Common pitfalls

  • Hosting the status page on the same infrastructure as the product.
  • Vague, infrequent updates; no “next update” commitment.
  • Marking “All Operational” while components are degraded.
  • Hiding history or deleting incidents.
  • No mobile layout or accessibility issues (screen-reader labels, contrast).