We're really excited to announce the launch of a free tool we're calling Better Error Pages! Better Error Pages is a mini-site that helps you build customizable 404, 500-level, and maintenance pages in 60 seconds.
Here's how it works:
- We ask you a few questions about your company (things like Homepage URL and Support Email Address).
- You have the opportunity to personalize the look of your error pages.
- When you're done, we'll send you a link to download the flat HTML files for your shiny new 404, 503 and Maintenance pages.
You should check out Better Error Pages for yourself...it's free!
About 6 months ago, we launched the first version of a feature called Multitenancy, allowing for customer-specific status updates . Over these 6 months we've been working closely with a handful of enterprise customers and are extremely excited to launch V2 with new functionality and a new name - Access Control.
Company: C2FO
C2FO is the world’s market for working capital and risk-free profit. C2FO is the only working capital exchange that allows companies to optimize their working capital positions in a live, bid/ask environment. Companies across the globe use C2FO to increase their operating income while simultaneously producing vital working capital flows to their supply chain.
Employees: 100+
User: Patrick McDonald, Director of Network Ops
Infrastructure: Manages 20 servers in AWS, 10 in SoftLayer’s data centers
Team: Full 24x7 on-call organization with a 3 person Ops team outside of Patrick
Since launching the first version of StatusPage two years ago, every page has come with an incident history page built in. The history page allows end users to scan through past incidents, giving them a sense of overall company transparency, incident severity levels, and incident frequency. While the current history page does a good job of showcasing a company's transparency, we received several requests from customers to let end users filter through the history based on component(s).
Finding The Right Information Using Incident Filtering
Today, we're launching Incident Filtering for all Business customers so that finding incident history based on relevant components is a breeze. Instead of scrolling through the whole incident history list, end users can now pick and choose the history that they care to see. As an example, a typical business user of a product may only need to view incidents affecting a dashboard or portal, while an API user may only care to filter for incidents affecting an API.
Getting Started
Enable Component Subscriptions
To get started, you'll first need to enable Component Subscriptions within the management portal.
Associate Incidents with Components
With Component Subscriptions enabled, you'll now be able to associate incidents with whichever component(s) are affected during an outage.
Filter based on component
By choosing which components are affected by an incident, we'll be able to notify the right subscribers and also let end users filter through your page's incident history.
Shoot us a note at hi@statuspage.io if you have any questions or feedback!
Over the past few weeks we've been beta testing Component Groups and are happy to release the functionality to all users today. Here's a quick look at a few use cases.
3rd-Party Services
There's a good chance your software relies on other external services to work on a day to day basis. For StatusPage.io, mission critical services include AWS for hosting, Mailgun for email notifications, and Twilio for SMS notifications. One perfect use case for Component Groups is taking any 3rd-Party Components that you've enabled and bundling them under a 3rd Party Services group as Datadog has done here.
Localized Regions
As a CDN like CloudFlare or a hosting provider, your status page is most likely broken out by data center region. Within each region, there may be a varying amount of individual data centers. Instead of having to list each individual data center out on the page, Component Groups lets you group these data centers together into the appropriate region, keeping your page clean and easily accessible to end customers. Take a look at CloudFlare's status page as a great example.
Feature Groups
One common use case for grouping similar components together is on the feature level. Using Raven Tools, an internet marketing software company, as an example, you'll see that individual features such as Campaigns, Email Metrics, and Research Central are broken out into their own groupings. This type of implementation makes sense when each feature's sub-components individually could have issues without impacting the entire application.
Internal User Groups
Many of our customers use StatusPage.io internally as the definitive source of status information and notifications for employees. While most of these companies take advantage of Component Subscriptions to let employees opt-in to relevant notifications, until now, the status page displays mostly consisted of long listings of internal components. To make for a better and logical end user experience, you should think about grouping components by end user group, such as customer support, sales, executives, or engineering.
Getting Started
Component Groups are accessible for all StatusPage.io subscriptions. To get started, take a read over the knowledge base article and then head to Components within your dashboard. If you have any questions or feedback, shoot us a note at hi@statuspage.io!
StatusPage.io is now an official HipChat add-on, eliminating the need to paste API keys and allowing all HipChat users to install the integration in just a few clicks. Using the add-on, users can automatically send status information such as component and incident updates directly into designated HipChat rooms, keeping everyone in a company up to date with system status while letting engineering focus on fixing the problem at hand.
"StatusPage.io's HipChat integration is by far the best way to keep our team updated when we're dealing with trouble. Things can get hectic at these times and it's great having the notifications in our room where they will not be missed." - Garret Heaton, Co-founder of HipChat
To get started, install the add-on within the Atlassian Marketplace. Feel free to get in touch or reference our step by step guide if you have any questions getting setup!
A few example incident updates piped directly into HipChat.
StatusPage.io customers have always been able to embed data from their status page within their app, but now it's easier than ever. We recently released a completely revamped API interface to easily embed the information from your status page into your management portal, or 4xx and 5xx error pages.
If you haven't already enabled it, you can find more information in your dashboard by enabling it in the Add-on Store.
Benefits Of Embedding Your Status In Your Webapp
Increased Trust
Your systems are probably Fully Operational 99%+ of the time. Use this to your advantage! Giving this a small nod in the footer or help section of your website is a way to subtly but constantly reassuring your customers that everything is going great; people love constant reassurance.
TempoDB includes their system status on every page in their footer.
Deflect Unnecessary Inbound Support Tickets
Everyone has problems from time to time. When something does go wrong, it's better to tell your customers upfront about the problem rather than them writing in and asking what's wrong.
UserVoice displays their current status and links back to their status page directly in their webapp.
Live Demo
Below is a CodePen with a working demo that includes the status of our Acme API Co. demo page in the footer and in the dropdown in the header. The tabs at the top allow you to switch between the actual HTML/CSS/Javascript which have comments showing you how we're constructing the status information. Please feel free to copy as much of this as you want to use it on your own site.
See the Pen StatusPage.io Status Embed Example by Steve Klein (@stevenklein) on CodePen.
Letting Your Customers Hook Into Your Status Page
We also made it really easy for your customers to get information out of your status page as well. If you append "/api" to your status page, you'll find the API docs that explain how to get information about your current status, incidents, components, and even scheduled maintenances. Here's an example of the page.
Today, we’re extremely excited to announce a new integration with PagerDuty, allowing all PagerDuty and StatusPage.io customers to automatically update StatusPage components, and post StatusPage.io incidents in response to PagerDuty incidents being triggered, updated, and resolved.
Internal Status Pages For The Win
PagerDuty, the leading operations performance management platform, is used by thousands of operations and developers across the globe from Heroku to Airbnb to decrease resolution time. By centralizing events across all monitoring tools, teams can get visibility across all their systems to discover root causes, faster. While PagerDuty works incredibly well for incident management within Ops teams, users can easily get bogged down with internal support emails from every other department including product, sales, and customer support wondering about the latest status updates. Instead of 100% fixing the problem at hand, Ops teams have to split time between debugging and replying to internal emails. Enter StatusPage.io.
Using StatusPage.io, PagerDuty customers can set up internal status pages as a source of truth for all employees in a company. By linking PagerDuty Services to StatusPage.io Components and creating a few rules when an incident is triggered, StatusPage.io can automatically update companies’ internal status pages. Employees can opt in for proactive SMS and email notifications as well, keeping the whole company informed during an incident and letting the Ops team focus on what they do best.
Increasing Customer Transparency
While outages happen, top-notch downtime communication is key to keeping customers happy, building trust, and reducing churned customers to your competitors. Using the new StatusPage.io + PagerDuty integration, you can provide incredible customer support experiences by automatically notifying your customers when your systems fail or are under stress. Even a simple and proactive ‘We’re currently experiencing a high load and are investigating the cause’ goes a long way for a customer wondering why your management portal isn’t loading. Trust us, transparency wins out in the long run, and top technology companies such as Citrix, New Relic, and Atlassian are already ahead of the curve.
How It Works
For the full walkthrough, head over to our thorough help article or check out this video with a few examples:
Getting Started
To get started, create a StatusPage.io account today and activate the integration within our Add-On Store!
In order to further improve our first time user experience, we're moving to an "Add-on Store" model of selectively hiding features. The Add-on Store will allow you to enhance or turn on features that aren't part of the core experience of the product.
Feature Creep vs. First Run User Experience
Now that the company is a little over a year old, we're starting to feel "feature-creep" monster is starting to rear its ugly head. A little feature here, an integration over there, some options sprinkled around for good measure...and your once simple webapp is starting to look like Salesforce. You'll feel like you're improving things, but you're going to be crying the next time you do usability testing with some brand new users. Even if you personally know exactly what every knob and button in your app does, you have to be conscious of the fact that every detail takes away importance from every other detail -- and first-time users can only process so much before getting overwhelmed and calling it quits.
Adding Value Without Overwhelming
We feel like having an Add-on Store is a great way to not overwhelm first-time users while still giving power users the advanced features and control they want. It's very important to us that our users actually enjoy using our product, and products with too many features and settings rarely are a joy to use.
How It Affects You
The add-on store is live as Friday, June 20th. If you created your account before that, all of the add-ons in the store are activated for you. Any accounts created after the deploy have a few add-ons activated for demo purposes, but the rest are inactive by default. You can find the add-on store by clicking the link in the top right when logged in.
