Using a Status Page to Enhance Your Incident Response Process

Status pages can be valuable communication tools for both internal and external audiences. They can improve transparency throughout your organization, including with customers, external stakeholders, colleagues, and peers.

What is a Status Page?

A status page is a webpage that displays the current operational status of your various services. This can include whether they are fully functional, partially degraded, or severely affected. You can customize the status nomenclature to reflect your specific needs. The page can also provide access to uptime data and incident history for all your internal and customer-facing components.

During an outage, you can update the status page to keep everyone informed about the service disruption and the resolution activities underway. This allows them to understand the impact the outage may have on their systems and communicate effectively with their stakeholders.

Status pages are particularly useful because outages often involve multiple teams, which can complicate incident communication. To improve transparency, consider two broad categories of data visibility:

• Internal Communication (Private Status Page)
• External Communication (Public Status Page)

Internal communication can be further divided into two categories based on the level of collaboration required to resolve an incident and the overall culture of your organization.

• Engineering Transparency: This type of communication is exclusive to your engineering teams and facilitates collaboration between members of the incident resolution team. You might include metrics like SLOs, SLIs, logs, and traces that engineers understand well. Runbooks, incident timelines, incident response basics, glossaries and a shared knowledge base are other examples of useful resources.
• Organizational Transparency: Teams like marketing, support, and product act as bridges between customers and engineers. Keeping them informed about customer-facing issues is crucial. This allows them to prepare external communication for impacted customers and gives support teams a heads-up. Product teams can also gain valuable insights into the current state of the systems and use this information to adjust or improve Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for the affected services.

External communication refers to any information that needs to be relayed directly to customers or other external stakeholders. An effective status page can build trust with your customers.

The most critical information for customers during an outage includes the operational status of your services, the severity of the impact, impacted dependent services and the steps being taken to resolve the issue. Providing this information can significantly improve customer experience.

In essence, status pages can be used in various formats for internal or external communication, fostering a culture of transparency across your organization.

Why Do You Need a Status Page?

Incident management involves a combination of teams, tools, and processes. Many popular tools exist for incident alerting and scheduling, but most lack a critical feature: incident communication.

Incident communication is a frequently overlooked aspect of incident response that can significantly impact customer experience. During an incident, the focus is often on resolution rather than communication. This can make it difficult and distracting for incident responders to switch between resolving the issue and communicating the outage to customers. The role of “external communications liaison” emerged to address this challenge by communicating relevant information to support teams and other customer-facing groups, as well as posting updates to public status pages.

As companies take reliability more seriously and implement SLAs and SLOs, proactive communication systems become increasingly important. A status page allows you to proactively inform customers about potential issues instead of waiting for them to raise a support ticket.

Status pages are an effective solution to streamlining internal and external incident communication. They can serve as a central source for your service reliability data, hosting downtime information and making it accessible through various channels.

Should You Build Your Own Status Page?

Building and hosting your own status page may seem appealing, but it’s generally not recommended. While technically possible, it can consume considerable time and resources to develop and maintain a fully functional solution. The time, effort, and money required to maintain and update a custom status page is often not justified. In most cases, you’ll need a dedicated team to manage your entire engineering operations for building and maintaining the status page. Using a service that provides a ready-made status page that is guaranteed to be up and running is a much better option.

Why We Made Status Pages an Integral Part of the Incident Response Process

There are several paid services and even some basic open-source options available for status pages. Here are some key factors to consider when choosing a solution:

• Ease of setup
• Public and private hosting options
• Accommodation of multiple communication channels

While many tools offer some of these features, few integrate status pages seamlessly into the incident response process to eliminate context switching between your incident response tool and status communication tool