Two years ago, on June 4th of 2018, Microsoft announced its acquisition of GitHub, unicorn darling of the developer tools startup ecosystem, for $7.5B in stock. The announcement unearthed a wide range of opinions and pontifications, ranging from “GitHub is doomed” to “Microsoft is smart”, with many predictions about GitHub’s future. Some thought Microsoft’s growing investments in its cloud offering, Azure, might help GitHub.
A major goal of DevOps is task and process automation. While total automation is possible to a large extent, DevOps engineers can’t just run a process and then leave it. They need to quickly react in the event of downtime and incidents. Usually, it’s important to react as fast as possible because downtime for even a few minutes can cost from $2,300 to $9,000 according to the Ponemon Institute in 2016 and a 14-hour outrage cost Facebook an estimated $90 million in March 2019.
Since 2015, StatusGator has offered a unique solution for monitoring the status of hundreds of cloud services. By aggregating each service’s status page into a unified API, StatusGator provides the status of all your dependencies in a single place. Our status page webhooks solution was previously quite basic and limited in its capabilities. But we recently launched StatusGator webhooks v2 and invite you to try it now.
Several times throughout the last five years of StatusGator, we have received requests for organizational accounts. As more and larger teams have joined, there’s been a steady increase in requests for multi-user accounts. We are proud to announce that StatusGator Organization accounts are now available on our Start Up plan and above. Our first implementation of this is quite simple: separate user accounts are joined together by linking them to a parent Organization record.
Public status pages have risen to become an essential requirement for all publicly facing web services. A well-constructed status page is a hallmark of a customer-centric organization. Status pages provide transparency and help reduce customer support requests during an inevitable outage. With sufficient component details, they can serve as useful information hubs for customers experiencing issues. There are numerous services to make setting up a status page simple and inexpensive.
Exactly two years ago, Microsoft announced Teams at an elaborate launch event in New York City. Hailed by many as a “Slack killer“, Teams was positioned by Microsoft as a group messaging platform. It was clear from the start that they took aim directly at Slack and its numerous competitors. Slack even acknowledged the encroachment of Microsoft in a full page ad in the New York Times.
Has this scenario happened to you? You found a service. A SaaS product or hosted service: it could be anything. Maybe it’s a continuous integration service or perhaps it’s a service for capturing comments on your web site. Let’s call it Useful Service. You sign up, and you’re happy with it. Now you depend on it and your fortunes are tied to it. But day in and day out, it’s there for you, working reliably. Then all of the sudden: it’s not.
What does it take to write a GDPR compliant privacy policy? It was easier than we realized! This is a continuation of our series on ensuring StatusGator complies with the terms of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR has very specific requirements for privacy policies. Companies must provide clear and accessible information about the personal data they collect and what they do with it.
Recently, a StatusGator user on our 30 day free trial contacted us to inquire if StatusGator was GDPR compliant. The General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is the European Union’s regulation that grants rights and requirements over personal data. Although we’ve been following the GDPR and its rollout for some time now, we haven’t taken active steps to comply with its requirements. We are based in the United States and don’t actively target European customers.
Keeping your customers informed of the status of your website, application, or service is essential nowadays. If you don’t have a status page to communicate this, you’re missing an opportunity to improve transparency and reduce customer support burden. This is especially true if you are running an online business and your website is your main source of income, a status page is crucial not only for your business but for your customers as well.
