Status Page Maker

Tell customers what is going on, even when it is bad

When something breaks, the worst thing is silence. A status page gives people one place to check before they write to support, and it shows you take outages seriously.

Set up in four steps

1. Name the page. "Acme Cloud Status" works. Add a short description and a support contact.
2. List components. Break your product into parts customers recognise: Website, API, Dashboard, Payments, Email delivery. Avoid internal names.
3. Set the statuses. Everything starts as operational. Change a component when it is degraded, partly down, fully down or in maintenance.
4. Publish. You get a public link and a private manage link. Save the manage link: it is your editor.

Writing incident updates

A useful update says what customers see, what you know and when you will update again. Keep the pattern:

• Investigating. "Some users cannot log in. We are looking into it."
• Identified. "A database change caused the errors. We are rolling it back."
• Monitoring. "The fix is live. We are watching error rates."
• Resolved. "Logins work again. Sorry for the trouble."

Post an update every 30 to 60 minutes during a long incident, even if the news is "no change".

Planned maintenance

Set the component to under maintenance and add an incident that says when it starts and how long it should take. Switch back to operational afterwards.

Limits

This is a manual page. It does not send emails, subscribe users or check anything automatically, and it is not indexed by search engines. Times in updates are shown in UTC.