Even the best in class online services can be impacted by downtimes. This could be due to an unexpected interruption, often called incident - or a maintenance.
A maintenance is of course an intentional task to be done, with the intention to provide an even better service.
For the customers it is generally a disturbed experience because they cannot use the offering, so no matter is affected by an unexpected downtime or a maintenance it is just fair to let the users know about that.
Statuspage helps to communicate the current status of a service in a transparent way.
On top of that Statuspage can be used for pro-active communication and last but not least it can be fully branded to the needs of the company which offers the service. This includes the user interface and also the URL users type in to open the Statuspage.
Displaying the status of a service
| What is this about? | Often a service consists of more than just a few components. A service might have a frontend, a backend, an app that users can install on their smartphone - or think of a shopping website where users can browse the offerings but also log in to a personal area where they can see past orders. Statuspage is able to display both - the whole service status but also the status of the components. |
| How does this help my team? | In case of an incident or a maintenance not necessarily all components are unavailable the same time - using Statuspage this can be reflected easily so it is easy to understand which part of a service is not working right now. After the service is recovered users can easily see when it was disturbed in the past, also the history is transparently visible. |
Pro-active communication towards the users
| What is this about? | Checking a Statuspage is a viable option to check if a service is up. Many users prefer to get a pro-active notification via mail, text message on their smartphone or RSS feed, in case a service is unavailable. Using Statuspage every custom can decide on their own if they want to make use of that option. |
| How does this help my team? | This kind of pro-active communication reduces calls to the hotline of a service. Users get information from a trustworthy source and are kept informed what has happened, which actions are taken and (in many cases) also when the service will be up again. |
Customization and branding
| What is this about? | The best solution would not help if data is not presented in a nice way. Luckily, using Statuspage it is possible to customize the look and feel so it aligns the corporate identity/corporate design guidelines of any company providing a service. Also, it is possible to connect an own domain to Statuspage, so it integrates seamlessly into the design of a service's webpage. Many webpages directly link to Statuspage from their main webpage which adds trust and transparency in regards to their offering. More on customization you can learn here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage/features/customization |
| How does this help my team? | While Statuspage runs in the cloud it will make no noticeable difference by means of look and feel and URL scheme compared to the main webpage of a service. Many users appreciate that Statuspage is a cloud offering. During an outage there is a higher likeliness status information could not be server because of the very same incident. Same time a seamless integration is crucial. Using Statuspage this is guaranteed. |
Integration and automation
| What is this about? | In case a service is experiencing an outage this information must be transported into Statuspage. The same applies to planned maintenances. While some service providers prefer to manage this information directly in Statuspage it also can be automated. Integrations with other solutions are also possible. |
| How does this help my team? | Automation and integration helps users to concentrate on fixing the root cause for an incident or finishing maintenances earlier. A common use case are monitoring systems that notify a technical team about an outage, same time Statuspage is updated reflecting there is some kind of incident going on. There is, just to name one example, also an integration with Opsgenie available - a different product from Atlassian which can interact with Statuspage. It can be used to notify on-call duties or, even that is possible, to update Statuspage based on an open alert in Opsgenie. See yourself what is possible using integrations: https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage/integrations |
What's next?
There is a lot more to discover!
For example you can define templates which help in case of an incident to select the information users should see. This saves a lot of time!
Also third-party which a service relies on can be monitored.
As soon an this service is down the Statuspage can reflect that because of a dependency the service of the provider is unlikely to work.
Statuspage comes even with a free plan - it is suited for smaller teams. A subscription is possible here any time: https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage/pricing
This page also compares the different plans which are available for companies, up to large enterprises.
Personal experience and recommendation
In the past my team came across several implementations for providing status information about services. Operating an own solution is a challenging task. The system must be available even when the rest of the infrastructure is probably down and therefore we found it to be easier to use Statuspage. As a cloud service availability is given even when the service provider's own network is impacted by an incident or a maintenance.
Also, important features like integrations, automation and pro-active communication are available out of the box.
Customers build up trust and appreciate transparent information about service status, recent downtimes and announced maintenances.
