Introduction to Status Page Tools
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.
How Status Page Tools Benefit Engineering Teams?
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:
Pull based Visibility
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).
Smooth communication during an incident
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.
Driving Accountability internally
“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.
Industry norm in B2B software
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.
How to Choose the Status Page Tools?
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:
Automated Stakeholder Communications
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.
Integrations
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:
- Integration with monitoring tools -- Can the API latency SLA be automatically connected to a metric in Datadog or any other APM? This would enable auto-updation
- Integration with Incident management tools -- Can the status page automatically reflect an update when someone adds an update to a Sev0 incident in Pagerduty or any other incident and on-call management tool?
- Integration with ticketing systems -- Do you require an integration with chat support tool like Intercom to ensure that users / support team can know about the impact through an embed or atleast avoid ticket duplications?
- Integrations with communication tools -- Do you need the statuspage to also send updates in a company wide Slack channel in case of an incident?
- Updation via APIs -- Does your team have a customised workflow that requires API endpoints of the statuspage to be able to update it’s visibility
Private vs Public Pages
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.
User interface and flexibility
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.
Pricing
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.
Popular Tools for Status Page Management
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
Tools
Statuspage.io
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
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):
- Automated Communication: Robust automated email and SMS alert system that ensures stakeholders are promptly informed about status changes.
- Customization: Offers a high degree of customization, supporting CSS edits and custom HTML to match the company’s branding.
- Integration Ecosystem: Extensive integrations with monitoring tools like New Relic, Datadog, and more, allowing automated incident creation and updates.
Considerations
- It is not an uptime tracker natively and needs the data to be fetched using an integration.
- Statuspage.io has limitations particularly regarding layout customization.
Pricing
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.
Relevant Links
StatusIQ by Site24x7
StatusIQ is provided by Site24x7. Alongside an APM, website monitoring and more, it also offers StatusIQ -- a status page offering.
Benefits
Benefits (pros):
- Real-time updates and communication: StatusIQ offers features for automating status updates, creating real-time incidents, and notifying users via email or SMS, ensuring timely and accurate communication during incidents and maintenance.
- Customization: StatusIQ allows users to customize various aspects of their status pages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, font, header, and footer.
- APIs: StatusIQ has rich API documentation, enabling a lot of automation from within a user’s own stack or monitoring tools.
Considerations
Site24x7 does not have 1-click integrations with 3rd party monitoring tools but has exhaustive APIs to enable any action like creating an incident.
Pricing
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.
Relevant Links
Instatus
Instatus offers easy-to-use status pages with minimal setup requirements.
Benefits
Instatus offers easy-to-use status pages with minimal setup requirements.
Benefits (pros):
- Simple Setup: Focuses on simplicity, allowing quick setup and easy maintenance without deep technical knowledge.
- Subscription Management: Offers a straightforward way for users to subscribe to updates via email or SMS, enhancing communication.
- Incident Templates: Includes pre-built templates for common incident types, speeding up the communication process during events.
Considerations
More feature-rich than some more established competitors.
Pricing
Instatus offers pricing plans for Basic ($79/month), Standard ($149/month), and Plus ($349/month), with a 5% discount for annual subscriptions.
Relevant Links
Cachet
Offers extensive customization options, allowing teams to tailor the status page to their specific aesthetic and functional requirements.
Benefits
Benefits (pros):
- Open Source and Customizable: Offers extensive customization options, allowing teams to tailor the status page to their specific aesthetic and functional requirements.
- Self-hosted: Gives complete control over data and infrastructure, suitable for organizations with strict data governance needs.
Considerations
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.
Pricing
Free as it is open-source; costs associated with hosting and managing the server yourself.
Relevant Links
Statusify
Allows extensive modifications and integrations, ideal for engineering teams needing a customizable solution.
Benefits
Benefits (pros):
- Open-Source: Allows extensive modifications and integrations, ideal for engineering teams needing a customizable solution.
- Simple Yet Effective: Provides a basic but very effective status page setup that is easy to deploy and manage.
Considerations
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.
Pricing
Free as it is open-source.
Relevant Links
Status.io - SPM
Status.io is another hosted status page tool.
Benefits
Status.io is another hosted status page tool.
Benefits (pros):
- Access to APIs across all the plans
- Lot of extensible features like Geo-maps, RSS feeds and more
Considerations
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.
Pricing
3 plans, starting at $79/month
Relevant Links
BetterStack
BetterStack provides advanced monitoring solutions with a focus on modern infrastructure needs.
Benefits
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):
- Fresh design: BetterStack’s status page have received frequent appreciation from users for their clean UI.
- 1-click Integrations: BetterStack has native integrations with the most popular monitoring tools, making it easy to build out features without having to go to any of the APIs.
- Prompt support: BetterStack’s support team is known for quick and prompt response to it’s users.
Considerations
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.
Pricing
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.
Relevant Links
Uptime.com
Uptime.com provides robust monitoring solutions with detailed reporting capabilities.
Benefits
Uptime.com provides robust monitoring solutions with detailed reporting capabilities.
Benefits (pros):
- Detailed Reporting: Provides detailed uptime, response time, and outage reports, which are essential for performance analysis.
- Extensive Monitoring Capabilities: Supports monitoring from multiple global locations, accurately depicting the international user experience.
- SSL Monitoring: Includes SSL certificate monitoring, ensuring all certificates are up-to-date and secure.
Considerations
StatusPage is always clubbed together with other products in the pricing. It is not available to be purchased independently.
Pricing
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.
Relevant Links
Uptimerobot.com
Uptimerobot offers straightforward and cost-effective monitoring solutions.
Benefits
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):
- Economic Pricing: Very affordable even at higher tiers, making it accessible for startups and smaller companies.
- Powerful ping management
Considerations
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.
Pricing
UptimeRobot.com offers plans starting at $7 per month, providing website monitoring services
Relevant Links
PagerDuty
PagerDuty offers a comprehensive set of tools for real-time operations.
Benefits
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):
- Integrated Incident Response: Links directly with PagerDuty’s incident response features, allowing automatic updates and escalations based on monitoring alerts.
- Rich API for Automation: Provides a comprehensive API for integrating existing ITSM tools and automating workflows.
- Advanced Reporting: Offers advanced analytics on incident trends and response times, aiding in continuous improvement.
Considerations
Status Page is only accessible after having atleast the “Professional Plan” within PagerDuty.
Pricing
Pricing varies based on the scale of operations and feature set.
Relevant Links
Conclusion
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.
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