Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This blog post is adapted from my talk at SRECon EMEA 2023 - original slides are available here! Status pages are a simple yet underutilized element of incident communication. Done well, they’re a low-lift way to keep your customers and stakeholders informed when incidents impact them. But without a solid approach, updating status pages can easily become a tedious and often neglected task during incidents. In this post, we’ll cover some tips to get your status page right.

For SaaS companies and cloud vendors, a status page isn’t just a tool — it’s a testament to their commitment to users. But with numerous status page providers in the market, which ones are the top SaaS companies gravitating towards? It comes as no surprise that the most popular status page provider in 2023 is Statuspage.io offered by Atlassian. We expected it at StatusGator when we began our analysis. However, our curiosity didn’t stop there.

In the digital landscape of 2023, transparency and communication are pivotal pillars for building and maintaining trust with your user base. As your online operations expand, so does the imperative for clear, transparent, and proactive incident communication. A well-designed status page not only keeps your users informed during downtimes or technical issues but also reinforces your brand’s commitment to openness and quality service.

Maintaining high customer satisfaction is one of the most important parts of running a business, and part of keeping your customers happy is keeping them updated. This is especially critical for e-commerce or other digital services businesses, as some customers may not think they are as transparent as in-person stores. Status pages provide real-time and accurate information on the health and performance of your online services.

One to One Plus is a cloud-based, all-in-one software solution, tailored specifically to K-12 institutions. They provide a comprehensive suite of integrated IT asset management (ITAM), help desk software, and inventory management. As they describe on their website, they are “designed for K-12, built by K-12,” and appear to have been started by tech directors working in K12.

For most businesses, managing major incidents can be intimidating. With a swarm of information coming from different directions, keeping things organized and maintaining clear, effective communication is tough. It only gets worse when there's no defined process to follow. This disorganization confuses everyone, delays responses, and increases the incident escalation rate. Enter the incident commander (IC).

It’s exhausting, right? Having to repeat instructions or answer the same questions whenever your incident response teams experience a problem. At first, it may have been exciting — it was fulfilling to answer these questions and help your teams solve minor security alerts. You were the hero! You went ahead and documented all this information. But as your company grew and your attention was needed in other areas, these questions and issues started to lengthen incident response time.

Check our September 2023 health report on the top most popular cloud providers. We analyze the health of the cloud providers based on the number of outages and problems during the month. The source of the data is made available by the cloud providers themselves via their status page. We normalize it and use it to generate the report.

At StatusGator, we understand the critical importance of providing reliable monitoring services to our valued customers. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused by the recent issue affecting the monitoring of Microsoft Teams, which occurred from September 27, 2023, at 04:56 UTC to September 28, 2023, at 11:11 UTC. We deeply appreciate your patience and understanding as we addressed this incident and share our findings and actions taken to prevent future occurrences.