Statuspages are communication tools that display the current health of your various services. They can be used internally to keep teams aligned or externally to inform customers during outages. This blog post explores how status pages can improve your incident response process.
What is a Statuspage?
A statuspage is a webpage that provides real-time information about the operational status of your services. Common statuuses include operational, partially degraded, or major outage. You can also use your status page to display uptime data and incident history.
During an incident, you can update the statuspage to let people know about the issue and the resolution efforts underway. This helps them understand the impact on their systems and communicate effectively with stakeholders.
Why Use a Statuspage?
Incident management involves multiple teams, tools, and processes. While many tools exist for alerting and scheduling, incident communication is often overlooked. Clear communication during incidents is crucial for a positive customer experience.
Traditionally, communication fell to an âexternal communications liaisonâ who would update public status pages and keep customer-facing teams informed.
However, companies are increasingly focused on reliability and setting Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Objectives (SLOs). This necessitates proactive communication systems to let customers know about potential issues before they arise.
Status pages are an effective solution for streamlining internal and external communication during incidents. They act as a central source for service reliability data, providing information to anyone who needs it.
Building and Hosting a Status Page
Building and hosting your own status page can be a time-consuming endeavor. The maintenance and upkeep required often outweigh the benefits. There are many paid services and open-source options available that offer ready-made solutions.
Why Status Pages Should Be Part of Your Incident Response Process
When choosing a status page solution, consider these factors:
- Ease of setup
- Public and private hosting options
- Supported communication channels
Many tools offer some of these features, but Squadcast integrates status pages directly within its incident response platform. This eliminates context switching between tools and allows for automatic status updates based on incident severity.
The Future of Status Pages in Squadcast
Squadcast offers public and private status pages with email subscriptions and team access restrictions. Public status pages allow customers to subscribe for updates and see the real-time status of your services and their components.
Private status pages enable you to share the status of internal services with other internal teams. You can also see who is working on a specific incident and page the responsible teams.
In Conclusion
Statuspages are a valuable tool for improving communication during incident response. They can help to keep all stakeholders informed, minimize downtime, and improve customer experience. By choosing the right status page solution and integrating it with your incident response workflow, you can ensure that your team is prepared to handle any outage effectively.
Squadcast is an Incident Management tool thatâs purpose-built for SRE. Get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications and integrate with popular ChatOps tools. Work in collaboration using virtual incident war rooms and use automation to eliminate toil.
