Anatomy of a Status Page

A good status page builds trust by being transparent about service health. It’s the single source of truth for customers during incidents and the historical record of your reliability.

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Core elements

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Component list

Break your service into components that users understand: Components should map to things users interact with, not internal architecture. “PostgreSQL cluster” means nothing to a customer — “Database” or even just “API” is better.

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Component status

Each component has a status:

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Incident history

A timeline of past incidents, including:

• What happened
• Duration
• Root cause (brief)
• Resolution

This builds credibility. A status page with no incident history feels dishonest — every service has incidents.

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Uptime metrics

Display historical uptime percentages:

• Last 7 days, 30 days, 90 days
• Per component or as an aggregate
• Visual timeline showing green/yellow/red periods

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What makes a good status page

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Honest and timely

Update the page within minutes of detecting an issue. Don’t wait until you have a full diagnosis.

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Written for customers

Use language your customers understand:

• “API response times are elevated” ✓
• “Ingestion pipeline backpressure on Kafka partition 7” ✗

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Subscribable

Let users subscribe to updates via:

• Email notifications
• RSS/Atom feeds
• Webhook integration
• SMS (for critical services)

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Separate from your infrastructure

Host your status page on a different provider than your main service. If your cloud provider goes down, your status page should still be accessible.

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Incident update cadence

Even if nothing has changed, post an update: “We are continuing to investigate. No new information at this time.”

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Status Data in DevHelm

DevHelm’s Status Data feature tracks third-party service health, which feeds into your own status page decisions — if a dependency is down, your status page should reflect that impact.