What is a status page?
A status page is a web page that tells customers whether your services are working: current status per component, active incidents with updates, scheduled maintenance and recent uptime history. It can be public, password-protected or internal. A good status page updates from monitoring automatically and lets people subscribe to notifications.
Why a status page matters
During an outage, customers want to know whether the problem is on their side or yours. A status page answers that without a support ticket, and every update there is one fewer email to answer.
It also builds trust over time: 90 days of honest history with short, clear incident notes reads better than a page that is always green.
How to measure a status page
daily uptime = successful checks ÷ checks that day history uptime = successful checks ÷ all checks in the window
Worked example
A component is checked every minute, 1,440 times a day. On one day 18 checks failed; every other day in the 90-day window was clean.
- That day: (1,440 − 18) ÷ 1,440 = 98.75%, so its bar is not green.
- Over 90 days: 90 × 1,440 = 129,600 checks, of which 129,582 succeeded, so uptime = 99.986%.
- 18 failed one-minute checks represent about 18 minutes of downtime.
Result: One bad day barely moves the 90-day figure but stays visible as a coloured bar, which is the honest way to show it.
Common mistakes
- Hosting it on the same infrastructure. If the status page goes down with the product, it is useless exactly when needed.
- Updating it only by hand. In a hurry nobody remembers. Link components to monitors.
- Hiding incidents. An always-green page while users see errors destroys trust faster than the outage.
- Too much internal detail. Customers need the impact, any workaround and the time of the next update, not host names.
How Vigil handles a status page
- Vigil status pages group monitors into components with 90-day uptime bars, latency, incidents and scheduled maintenance, and update from the monitors automatically.
- Visitors subscribe by email, webhook, Slack or Discord or follow the Atom feed; status.json, an embeddable widget and badges are included. Pages can be members-only, password-protected, public or hidden, on your own domain with automatic HTTPS.
- Create one under Status pages; /status also tracks the status of popular services.
Status page: frequently asked questions
Should a status page be public?
For customer-facing products, usually yes. Internal tools and B2B services with confidential customers can use password-protected or members-only pages.
What should an incident update say?
What is affected, what users should do (if anything), what you are doing, and when the next update will come. Plain language, no blame.
Can a status page show third-party outages?
Yes, as components: Vigil's Dependency monitor reads the status of providers such as Stripe, GitHub, AWS or Cloudflare, so you can show when an upstream service is the cause.