Anything bad that can happen — will happen. This old adage applies 100% to the technology industry, where crashes and outages are far more common than the sales and marketing teams would want us to think. However, DevOps engineers that deal with infrastructure know how hard it is to ensure everything works as intended all of the time — and to configure monitoring that actually keeps track of a system’s health and helps prevent crashes and downtime.

A well-crafted status page is designed to save you time, energy, and resources when communicating service irregularities. Instead of fielding thousands of support requests when you experience an outage, a status page provides a self-service way for your customers to get up-to-the minute information about any current downtime. It also allows you to proactively communicate maintenance and other work in advance.

DevOps engineers always need to check processes, increase work efficiency, and optimize operations. The main part of the work is to improve the quality of the product and set up smooth workflows. That’s why you need to control systems and react to downtime as quickly as possible. One of the best ways to do so is to get timely notifications is Teams DevOps Applications. MS Teams is widely used in many companies, so you probably already have it.

Two years ago, on June 4th of 2018, Microsoft announced its acquisition of GitHub, unicorn darling of the developer tools startup ecosystem, for $7.5B in stock. The announcement unearthed a wide range of opinions and pontifications, ranging from “GitHub is doomed” to “Microsoft is smart”, with many predictions about GitHub’s future. Some thought Microsoft’s growing investments in its cloud offering, Azure, might help GitHub.

A major goal of DevOps is task and process automation. While total automation is possible to a large extent, DevOps engineers can’t just run a process and then leave it. They need to quickly react in the event of downtime and incidents. Usually, it’s important to react as fast as possible because downtime for even a few minutes can cost from $2,300 to $9,000 according to the Ponemon Institute in 2016 and a 14-hour outrage cost Facebook an estimated $90 million in March 2019.

Since 2015, StatusGator has offered a unique solution for monitoring the status of hundreds of cloud services. By aggregating each service’s status page into a unified API, StatusGator provides the status of all your dependencies in a single place. Our status page webhooks solution was previously quite basic and limited in its capabilities. But we recently launched StatusGator webhooks v2 and invite you to try it now.

Several times throughout the last five years of StatusGator, we have received requests for organizational accounts. As more and larger teams have joined, there’s been a steady increase in requests for multi-user accounts. We are proud to announce that StatusGator Organization accounts are now available on our Start Up plan and above. Our first implementation of this is quite simple: separate user accounts are joined together by linking them to a parent Organization record.

Public status pages have risen to become an essential requirement for all publicly facing web services. A well-constructed status page is a hallmark of a customer-centric organization. Status pages provide transparency and help reduce customer support requests during an inevitable outage. With sufficient component details, they can serve as useful information hubs for customers experiencing issues. There are numerous services to make setting up a status page simple and inexpensive.

Exactly two years ago, Microsoft announced Teams at an elaborate launch event in New York City. Hailed by many as a “Slack killer“, Teams was positioned by Microsoft as a group messaging platform. It was clear from the start that they took aim directly at Slack and its numerous competitors. Slack even acknowledged the encroachment of Microsoft in a full page ad in the New York Times.

Has this scenario happened to you? You found a service. A SaaS product or hosted service: it could be anything. Maybe it’s a continuous integration service or perhaps it’s a service for capturing comments on your web site. Let’s call it Useful Service. You sign up, and you’re happy with it. Now you depend on it and your fortunes are tied to it. But day in and day out, it’s there for you, working reliably. Then all of the sudden: it’s not.