100
points
1.4
difficulty
0
earned

Status Page

Category Description

A status page is a dedicated, publicly accessible web page that communicates the real-time operational health of a software product or service to end users, customers, and other stakeholders. When a service experiences degraded performance, a partial outage, or a complete failure, the status page serves as the authoritative, outbound communication channel — reducing inbound support volume by letting users self-diagnose rather than file tickets. Status pages also communicate scheduled maintenance windows in advance, display historical uptime data to build long-term trust, and create a timestamped audit trail of past incidents. The core value proposition is transparency: replacing silence and confusion during outages with structured, proactive communication.

Example Implementations

  • Betterstack (Status Page feature)
  • Instatus
  • Cachet (self-hosted, open source)

Target Audience

Status pages are used by software companies — ranging from indie developers and early-stage startups to large enterprises — that operate web services, APIs, or SaaS products with paying or otherwise dependent users. The primary internal users of the management interface are engineers, DevOps or SRE teams, and product managers responsible for incident communication. The primary external audience is the company's end users or customers, who visit the public-facing page to check system health without contacting support. A secondary internal audience is the organization's own employees, who may use private or internal-facing status pages to track the health of internal tooling.

Core Requirements

  1. Component management: Administrators must be able to define a list of named service components (e.g., "API", "Dashboard", "Payments"). Each component must have an independently configurable status with at minimum the following states: Operational, Degraded Performance, Partial Outage, and Major Outage. Components must be displayed on the public status page.

  2. Component groups: Administrators must be able to organize components into named groups (e.g., "Core Services", "Regional Infrastructure") for display on the public status page. Groups must be collapsible or otherwise visually distinct from individual components.

  3. Incident creation and lifecycle management: Administrators must be able to manually create an incident, associate it with one or more affected components, set the severity or impact level, write an initial message, and progress the incident through a defined lifecycle of statuses, at minimum: Investigating, Identified, Monitoring, and Resolved.

  4. Incident updates: Administrators must be able to append timestamped update messages to an ongoing incident without overwriting prior updates. The full chronological thread of updates must be visible on the public-facing status page while the incident is active and in the incident history afterward.

  5. Incident history: The public status page must display a log of past incidents, including their title, affected components, timestamps of creation and resolution, and the full thread of updates. This history must be accessible to visitors without authentication and must persist indefinitely (not automatically purged).

  6. Scheduled maintenance: Administrators must be able to schedule planned maintenance windows with a defined start and end time, a title, a description, and association with one or more components. Scheduled maintenance must appear on the public status page in advance of the window and must update automatically when the window begins and ends.

  7. Public status page: The system must generate a public-facing status page accessible without authentication. The page must show: the current status of all components, any active incidents, upcoming scheduled maintenance, and a historical incident log. The page must be navigable by unauthenticated visitors.

  8. Overall system status indicator: The public status page must display an aggregate, top-level system status derived from the current state of all components. This indicator must automatically reflect the worst-case component state (e.g., if any component is in Major Outage, the overall status should not display as Operational).

  9. Subscriber notifications — email: Visitors to the public status page must be able to subscribe to incident and maintenance notifications via email without creating an account. Subscribers must receive notifications when new incidents are created, when incident updates are posted, and when incidents are resolved. Subscribers must be able to unsubscribe at any time via a link in the notification email.

  10. Subdomain / custom URL: The status page must be served on a configurable URL. At minimum, the system must support a subdomain on the product's own domain (e.g., status.example.com) via DNS configuration. The status page must be served over HTTPS.

  11. Basic branding customization: Administrators must be able to configure the status page with at minimum: a company or product name, a logo image, and a primary brand color. These settings must be reflected on the public-facing page.

  12. Admin management dashboard: The product must provide a password-protected administrative interface through which authorized team members can manage components, create and update incidents, schedule maintenance, manage subscribers, and configure page settings. This dashboard must be distinct from the public-facing status page.

  13. Team member management: Administrators must be able to invite additional team members to access the management dashboard by email. Administrators must be able to remove team members. At minimum, the system must support a distinction between administrators (full access, including billing and user management) and standard team members (can create and update incidents and change component statuses but cannot manage team membership or billing).

  14. API access: The system must expose a documented REST API that allows external systems (e.g., monitoring tools, CI/CD pipelines) to programmatically read component statuses and create or update incidents. API access must be authenticated with a token or key. The API must support at minimum: listing components, updating a component's status, creating an incident, and posting an incident update.

  15. Incident templates: Administrators must be able to create and save named text templates for common incident types (e.g., "Database Degradation", "Third-Party Provider Issue"). These templates must be selectable when creating a new incident to pre-populate the incident message, reducing time-to-communicate during active outages.

  16. Historical uptime metrics display: The public status page must display a visual uptime history for each component (e.g., a rolling 90-day bar chart or similar), showing periods of degradation or downtime versus operational status. This display must be automatically derived from the incident and component status history.

  17. Subscriber management: Administrators must be able to view the list of email subscribers, see how many subscribers exist, and manually remove individual subscribers from the management dashboard.

Cross-Cutting Requirements

  1. Multi-tenancy: The application must support multiple independent organizations (tenants), each with isolated data.
  2. Authentication: Users must authenticate with email/password at minimum. SSO and OAuth are not required.
  3. Role-based authorization: The application must support at least three roles — administrator, manager, and standard user — with distinct permission levels appropriate to the category.
  4. Data persistence: All user data must be persisted across sessions in a database.
  5. Web application: The application must be accessible via a web browser. Native desktop or mobile applications are not required.
  6. Concurrent users: The application must support multiple users within the same tenant using the application simultaneously without data corruption or loss.
  7. Responsive design: The web application must be usable on both desktop and mobile browsers. A native mobile app is not required.

Scope Boundaries

  • Automated uptime monitoring is not required. The system is not required to actively poll URLs, ping servers, or check SSL certificates. Integrations with external monitoring tools that trigger status changes via API are sufficient; the status page itself does not need to be the monitoring agent.
  • SMS subscriber notifications are not required. Email subscription is the only required notification channel for end users.
  • Webhook subscriber notifications are not required. Outbound webhooks to external systems (e.g., Slack channels, PagerDuty) are not required.
  • Slack or Teams integration for incident creation is not required. Administrators are not required to be able to create or update incidents from within a chat platform.
  • Private / password-protected status pages are not required. The public-facing status page accessible to all unauthenticated visitors is the only required page type; access-restricted pages for specific customer segments or internal teams are out of scope.
  • Audience-specific pages are not required. Showing different component subsets or different statuses to different visitor groups is not required.
  • Component-level subscriptions are not required. Subscribers are not required to be able to subscribe to only a subset of components; subscribing to the entire page is sufficient.
  • Custom CSS, HTML, or JavaScript injection is not required. Full white-label or code-level theming is not required; basic branding (name, logo, color) is sufficient.
  • Custom email sender domain is not required. Notification emails may be sent from the platform's own sending domain.
  • SSO / SAML for team member authentication is not required. Email/password login for dashboard users is sufficient.
  • On-call scheduling and escalation policies are not required. Routing alerts to specific individuals based on schedules or escalation rules is a separate incident management capability.
  • Incident post-mortems or root cause analysis documents are not required. Publishing formal post-incident reports attached to resolved incidents is not required.
  • Third-party component status aggregation is not required. Pulling live status data from external providers (e.g., displaying AWS or Stripe's status on your own page) is not required.
  • Metrics and performance charts are not required. Displaying time-series response time graphs or custom business metrics on the status page is not required (beyond the historical uptime bar chart required in core requirements).
  • CDN-delivered or edge-cached status pages are not required. The status page is not required to remain accessible independent of the application server infrastructure.
  • Mobile native application is not required. A native iOS or Android app for managing incidents is not required.
  • Billing and subscription management is not required. Payment processing, plan enforcement, and usage-based gating are not required.
  • Status page embed widget is not required. A floating badge, banner, or embeddable JavaScript widget for showing status within a third-party product is not required.
  • Dark mode is not required.
  • Multi-language / internationalization of the public page is not required. The status page may be displayed in a single language.

Spec Metadata

  • Version: 1.0
  • Created: 2026-03-15
  • Last Updated: 2026-03-15
  • Status: Draft
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