What is a Status Page?

A status page is a public dashboard that shows the current operational status of your services. It's how you communicate uptime, incidents, and maintenance to your users.

Why Status Pages Matter

Reduce support tickets — Users can self-serve to check if there's an issue
Build trust — Transparency about uptime shows you take reliability seriously
Professional image — Customers expect status pages from serious services
Historical record — Document your uptime track record

Common Status Page Components

Current Status

Shows whether each service is operational, degraded, or down. Usually with colored indicators (green/yellow/red).

Uptime History

Visual timeline (often 90 days) showing historical uptime. Green bars for good days, red for incidents.

Incident Updates

Real-time updates during outages. Shows timeline from detection to resolution.

Scheduled Maintenance

Upcoming maintenance windows so users can plan around them.

Status Indicators

Operational — Everything working normally
Degraded — Partial outage or slow performance
Major Outage — Service is down
Maintenance — Scheduled downtime

Best Practices

Be honest — Don't hide incidents. Users notice and lose trust.
Update frequently — During incidents, post updates every 15-30 minutes
Use clear language — Avoid jargon. "Login is slow" beats "Authentication service degraded"
Post post-mortems — After major incidents, explain what happened and how you're preventing it
Offer subscriptions — Let users subscribe via email or RSS for updates

Popular Status Page Tools

Statuspage — Atlassian's hosted status page solution
Better Uptime — Monitoring with built-in status pages
Instatus — Modern, fast status pages
Cachet — Open-source, self-hosted option

Status Page vs Uptime Monitoring

They work together but serve different purposes. Uptime monitoring detects when something goes wrong (and alerts your team). Status pages communicate that status to your users. Most teams use both: monitoring tools to detect issues, status pages to communicate them.