Know when to automate your status page

Some people confuse Statuspage for a monitoring tool, but that’s not really what we do. Statuspage doesn’t ping your servers or endpoints to check the status, but we do integrate with several monitoring and alerting tools, which allows you to automate parts of your status page if you want.

Statuspage is a communication tool.

We built Statuspage with one goal in mind; make it easier for teams to communicate with their customers during incidents. When things go wrong, we help you get the message out to the people that matter most: your customers and users. The way most people do that is by dedicating a team to manage their status page.

When an incident occurs, that team updates the status page to let affected users know.

Here's what that looks like on the status page:

Human-driven vs automated

We’re big believers in maintaining a human touch with incident communication. A fully automated status page means you have computers talking to people. That’s risky as it can result in a poor user experience by way of false negatives, false positives, lack of context, and flapping notifications. As a best practice, we never recommend fully automating your status page. There are ways you can take a hybrid manual/automated approach, which we’ll discuss more below.

You can think of Statuspage as a replacement to using a mass email marketing tool to do your incident communication. We provide a single place to communicate with your users during an incident. Your messages are published to your status page and they can be sent out as email or text message notifications to your users (if they opt-in), and embedded directly in your own interface or website.

When to automate your Statuspage

There are some cases where it might make sense to automate your status page.

• Maybe you're using your status page on a smaller scale, to keep your team in the loop on the health of your services… an automatic incident notification might make sense there.

• Or maybe you want to programmatically update components based on monitors you have set up and then use Statuspage as a health/status dashboard.

• Or maybe you want to publish an incident to your status page once you acknowledge an alert in a different tool.

Whatever the case, you can automate your status page a few different ways.

Ways you can automate your status page

When people ask about automating their status page, they’re typically looking to automatically update the status of their components, and/or automatically publish incidents on their status page. There are several ways you can go about doing both.

Automating your status page using third-party components

Third-party components allow you to display the system status of other services you rely on directly on your own status page. So, for example, if your infrastructure relies heavily on the Sendgrid API, you can enable the Sendgrid third-party component to display their API status on your page, and it’s automatically updated when they change the status on their page. You can override the status if need be. We have a large (and growing) network of third-party components which you can enable on your page.

Automating your status page using an integration

There are several monitoring and alerting tools which can be used to automatically update your status page. We’ve included a comprehensive list below.

Automating your status page using the Manage API

You can use our API to programmatically update your status page by writing your own integration. In addition to being able to update your page’s components and and incidents, you can create subscribers, metrics, and much more with the Manage API.

Automating your status page using email automation

If none of the above automation options are a good solution for you, you might want to look into using email automation. This is another way to automatically update the status of your components, and it’s done by triggering an email with a subject line containing the word “UP” or “Down” to be sent to a unique email address which we provide.

We really recommend using one of the integrations or our API for automating your page. We do everything we can do make sure these emails get to the right place at the right time, but the very nature of email is far less reliable than making an API call.