Although the term “status page” may sound novel, the fundamental idea of informing users of the systems’ status is not. To explain in simple terms, the status page is like a notice board in college. It will have the information of all announcements, upcoming events that a college had to convey to their students. Similarly, your organization’s status page serves as a notice board where important information about your systems and services is communicated to your end users.

Status page has now become a popular term in the market. A status page’s primary goal is to provide users with information on how well your application or service is functioning. Status pages are used to display the systems’ most recent operational status and to alert users to planned maintenance or outages. 

A status page may include the information listed below.

• Current state and services’/systems’ health
• The system’s durability and dependability over time
• Data on uptime/downtime
• Information about upcoming maintenance
• Information about any current outages
• Details of past incidents

Example of how a customer-facing status page will looks like:

Terminology for status pages:

Incident: An event that is not part of normal operations and disrupts the operational process. It implicates failure of a feature/service in a system

Scheduled Maintenance: It is a maintenance task that has been scheduled and is part of planned maintenance. 

Uptime: The period of time when the systems are operational.

Downtime: The period of time when the systems are not operational.

Subscribers: End users who consent to receive notifications for a service are called subscribers.

Manage entire Incident life cycle with Status page:

DevOps and IT teams use the incident management process to respond to an unanticipated event or service interruption and return the service to operational status.

With a status page, the entire incident life cycle can be managed. When an IT administrator becomes aware of an outage, they immediately raise an incident and provide all relevant information. The customer-facing status page will then automatically post this, and end users (subscribers) will also receive notifications via various channels like email and SMS. 

Different stages in the Incident Management cycle

• Investigation – An outage has been observed and team is investigating the issue
• Identification – Root cause has been identified and team is working on fix
• Monitoring The issue is fixed and team is monitoring the system
• Resolve – Issue is resolved

The IT administrator who is managing the incident will change the status accordingly, and the customer will be notified at each stage. This will ensure that the customer is kept updated on the outage. Additionally, end users can access the status page and view the server status. You can take this to the next level by integrating with helpdesk and messaging platforms like Zendesk, Slack…etc. Updates can be directly sent to users via these platforms.

The benefits of having a status page

It’s important to inform your customers of any system outages or upcoming activities. Customers will feel more assured in your systems and services as a result. This will also help you to build trust with customers and will improve customer satisfaction significantly by bringing this transparency.

Having a status page has the following advantages:

• Reduce support costs
• Minimize support requests and tickets during outages.
• Proactive communication regarding maintenance or downtime.
• Customer credibility.
• Increase customer confidence and trust
• More effective incident management

Conclusion:

Any system will occasionally experience downtime. Changing processes, adding new features, and fixing bugs are all ongoing processes in product development and improvement as we all strive to create the best products for our customers. Sometimes, this could lead to unforeseen errors and downtime. Therefore, having a status page for your business will ensure that your customers are kept informed and reached out to during downtimes and maintenance windows for your SaaS offerings. Having a status page will undoubtedly increase customer satisfaction and assist in fostering user confidence in your services.