Basic Concepts
Here are a few concepts that might help you better understand your status page and how you can better take advantage of it.
Status Page
Let's start with explaining what a status page is, the idea of a hosted status page is to allow you to communicate to your customers information about your site's status, this can be especially handy when you have a service disruption and you might not have other means to communicate this to them.
Service
Your site/app might have multiple services that comprise it or that it relays on, you'll want to represent them in your status page so that you are able to report incidents that affect them individually.
You don't need to expose them all necessarily, but the ones you want your customers to be aware of.
Another thing you can do with the services you register in your status page is monitor them, we can notify you and even automatically create an incident when they go down, to find out more read Configure monitoring for a service.
Incident
An incident report allows you to communicate to your customers that something is wrong in your system, either something that causes general down, slow responsiveness, data inconsistency, etc.
Incident severity
When you create an incident you can select its severity in the type field, it can be Minor or Major:
- Minor Incident: We recommend this type for an incident for when it does not cause down time on your system, your customers can still use your site, perhaps with some annoyance.
- Major Incident: If the incident is causing down time and/or disrupting the normal use of your system.
At the end of the day you are the most capable person to determine what a minor and major incidents are for your system, but this general guidelines might help.
To find out how to create an incident read Updating your Status (Or How to Create Incidents).
Scheduled Maintenance
A scheduled maintenance is a special kind of incident, mostly because it's something that is planed, even if it will cause system disruption.
A good example of a scheduled maintenance is, you want to switch DNS providers, and you know this will cause some down time, you should communicate this to your customers ahead of time so they take any preventive measures they might need.
You can do this with a scheduled maintenance, when you create them, we can notify your subscribers with the schedule you entered for the maintenance, we also display the maintenance a week ahead, so your customers get informed.
And once the time scheduled time comes, your status page reflects automatically that your system is under maintenance.
Subscribers
Subscribers are customers that subscriber to your status page to receive notifications via email about your site's status, once they subscribe they will receive an email whenever your create or update an incident/maintenance as long as you check the box "Notify subscribers via email".
They can easily opt out with a link provided in every email they will receive, you also have the option to remove them from your subscribers list.
Metrics
Metrics allow you to display charts in your status page representing metrics from different sources, at the moment two sources are supported Pingdom and custom metrics.
- Pingdom: A Pingdom metric allows you to display metrics, either response time or uptime from your Pingdom account, configuring a Pingdom metric is easy, just follow Configure Metrics from a Pingdom Check.
- Custom: A custom metric allows you to push your own data points to a metric, so you can represent any type of metric you might have.
We recommend next: First Steps.
You don't have a Status Page yet? go ahead and create one in seconds at Statuspal.io