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Today, most digital enterprises and softwares need to communicate with their users when something is amiss. From announcing planned maintenance to updating them about any updated downtimes, status pages help users be notified about real-time service interruptions.
Beyond communication, it also helps build trust by being open about service performance, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and retention.
Status page tools help companies, more specifically, engineering teams, to manage and communicate service health effectively. Here are some of the benefits of using Status pages:
Source: Atlassian
Without a status page, users are a bit anxious about “why isn’t the product working?” and might end up reaching on multiple forums -- from support chats to social media, waiting for companies to tell them (push based strategy). But with a status page, users can go and check the “status” if there’s any known impact across any of the company’s services (pull based strategy).
During an incident, all engineers are already tied up trying to continuously investigate and fix issues. Having a platform where engineering teams can send frequent updates enables them to focus on resolving issues rather than fielding status inquiries. With automated email alerts & subscriptions, it also ensures that stakeholders are informed promptly and consistently, reducing the communication overhead during critical incidents.
“What you track is what you improve.” -- B2B companies, especially in the infrastructure domain, have high SLOs commitments to their clients.
Monitoring SLOs and creating publicly available status pages help to keep clear visibility across their system’s stability -- not just within engineering team members but across the org. Additional dashboards can be created for enterprises or internal teams to have a larger set of metrics visible.
From a startup to a large enterprise, most software driven companies are expected to have a status page. Its appearance also reflects the company's brand.
Status Page tools are commoditized to a large extent and often do not have significant differences between them as you will see in the below comparisons. That said, here are the few capabilities that should be evaluated before finalising the tool:
During an incident, timely and accurate communication is key to managing expectations and reducing frustration. Look for a status page tool that supports automated emails.
This feature should allow you to send real-time updates as the situation evolves without manually managing each message. Automating this process ensures that all stakeholders are kept in the loop, minimizing the flood of inbound inquiries to your support team and allowing them to focus on resolving the issue.
Will an engineer or an engineering manager have to come to a status page’s dashboard to actually update the status? Typically manual involvement in these critical situations are quite tedious to manage and the tool you operate with should have the right kind of integrations that you require. Here are some of them:
Another significant feature is the ability to toggle between private and public pages. Public pages are great for general service announcements and can be accessed by anyone.
However, there might be situations where you need to communicate sensitive details that are only relevant to specific stakeholders or internal teams. In these cases, private pages come in handy. They ensure only authorised users can view particular updates, crucial for maintaining security and confidentiality.
The interface of status pages have become quite standardised overtime. But do you need any nested layer of information that’s specific to your company? Evaluate the component / design flexibility of the status pages so that you are not stuck with a poor information architecture in the future.
If your company does not have any deep requirements on customisations or integrations, it just makes sense to go evaluate a cost effective option in that case. Additionally, it’s not too bad of an idea to even go ahead with a vendor-branded free plan.
In this section, we will cover some of the popular tools for status page management and they are listed below:
Statuspage.io
Freshstatus by Freshworks
PagerDuty
Uptime.com
Uptimerobot.com
BetterStack
Instatus
Site24x7
Cachet
Statusfy
Statuspage.io is a leader in status and incident communication. It has become a norm in the industry, from Cloudflare to OpenAI status pages.
Acquired by Atlassian, Statuspage.io is a leader in status and incident communication. It has become a norm in the industry, from Cloudflare to OpenAI status pages.
Benefits (pros):
Statuspage.io offers pricing plans starting from $29 per month for a Hobby (Public Page) plan up to $1,499 monthly for an Enterprise (Private Page) plan, catering to various needs and budgets.
StatusIQ is provided by Site24x7. Alongside an APM, website monitoring and more, it also offers StatusIQ -- a status page offering.
Benefits (pros):
Site24x7 does not have 1-click integrations with 3rd party monitoring tools but has exhaustive APIs to enable any action like creating an incident.
Site24x7 is known for it’s cost effective options. The same can be seen here as well, where the paid plans start at $9/month/page.
Instatus offers easy-to-use status pages with minimal setup requirements.
Instatus offers easy-to-use status pages with minimal setup requirements.
Benefits (pros):
More feature-rich than some more established competitors.
Instatus offers pricing plans for Basic ($79/month), Standard ($149/month), and Plus ($349/month), with a 5% discount for annual subscriptions.
Offers extensive customization options, allowing teams to tailor the status page to their specific aesthetic and functional requirements.
Benefits (pros):
Self-Management Required: Being self-hosted means your team is responsible for maintaining and securing the server, which can add complexity.
Support and Updates: Dedicated professional support might be more prompt and detailed than relying on community support.
Free as it is open-source; costs associated with hosting and managing the server yourself.
Allows extensive modifications and integrations, ideal for engineering teams needing a customizable solution.
Benefits (pros):
Limited Features: While simple to use, it may need more advanced features found in more developed tools.
Developer Dependency: Developer involvement is required for setup and customization, which might only suit some organizations.
Free as it is open-source.
Status.io is another hosted status page tool.
Status.io is another hosted status page tool.
Benefits (pros):
No native integrations with third party tools like Datadog or Cloudwatch.
UI is quite basic compared to some of the other tools in the list that provide visually appealing interfaces.
3 plans, starting at $79/month
BetterStack provides advanced monitoring solutions with a focus on modern infrastructure needs.
BetterStack is an early stage startup that has products related to monitoring & observability. On the monitoring stack, it supports with uptime monitoring tool and status page tool.
Benefits (pros):
The tool is bundled alongside 3 other offerings so even if you decide to not use other features (uptime tracker, incident response management, on-call alerting tool), you’d be paying for a lot more features.
Better Stack offers plans a free plan where users can actually have a custom domain. (it’s quite rare in the category). Apart from that, they also multiple other buckets that go as high as ~$200/month.
Uptime.com provides robust monitoring solutions with detailed reporting capabilities.
Uptime.com provides robust monitoring solutions with detailed reporting capabilities.
Benefits (pros):
StatusPage is always clubbed together with other products in the pricing. It is not available to be purchased independently.
The free plan does not support a status page. You need to be on a paid plan and also need to purchase multiple capabilities, with status page being a tag-along sale.
Uptimerobot offers straightforward and cost-effective monitoring solutions.
Uptimerobot provides a platform for pingcheck, cron monitoring, port monitoring and related capabilities. It’s a clubbed product and does not have Status Page being sold independently.
Benefits (pros):
While UptimeRobot.com offers support, some users have reported delayed response times or limited support channels, which could potentially affect issue resolution speed.
Users have noted limitations in customising alerting settings, such as the frequency and channels for notifications, which may impact user preferences.
UptimeRobot.com offers plans starting at $7 per month, providing website monitoring services
PagerDuty offers a comprehensive set of tools for real-time operations.
PagerDuty is the most popular on-call alerting tool with additional modules for incident management, automation and more. If you are already using PagerDuty for other services, you could explore Pagerduty’s Statuspage.
Benefits (pros):
Status Page is only accessible after having atleast the “Professional Plan” within PagerDuty.
Pricing varies based on the scale of operations and feature set.
Selecting the right status page tool is critical for effectively communicating system status and maintaining trust with your users and stakeholders. Each tool listed offers unique advantages, from extensive customization and robust integration capabilities to simple, user-friendly interfaces suitable for smaller teams.
Evaluate these tools based on your needs, considering scalability, integration requirements, and your team's technical savviness. Choosing a tool that aligns with your organizational goals and technical environment can enhance transparency, improve communication, and ensure a better user experience.
