That’s right. You’ve nailed it. Your status page rocks. Your doing all the things right, and so your status page is awesome. Here is why:

StatusGator notifies you when status pages change. But the most overlooked feature of it might just be the unified dashboard that displays the status of every service you depend on. This can save precious minutes during a frantic incident response.

StatusGator is a status page aggregator. We monitor the world’s status pages and provide a unified dashboard which tracks the status pages each user cares about. But how do we collect and normalize all this data? To get started with StatusGator, you choose the services you already use from our list. For each service, you select the specific components from their status pages that you depended on.

Over the past several years, status pages have become more and more commonplace. They are not just a feature of the behemoth cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, but common among the multitudinous rank-and-file SaaS companies that every modern business depends on. Having a well-maintained status page is not just a luxury anymore.

StatusGator has been monitoring hundreds of status pages since 2015. Our aim has always been to aggregate the published status of the cloud services you depend on, making it available in any format you need, and notifying you when it changes.

If you’ve considered having a status page for your service but are discouraged by the pricing of status page services – consider running an open source status page system like Cachet. This post explains how to install and configure a Cachet status page on the popular DigitalOcean hosting platform. You can run Cachet on DigitalOcean for as little as $5/ month.

StatusGator monitors 411 different status pages, amassing a mountain of data about each. From when they are down and for how long, to what they post, to which pages people monitor the most and everything in between. Using that data, we are proud to present the first of an annual reflection on the past year. The First Annual StatusGator Status Page Awards seeks to applaud (and perhaps gently shame) a number of cloud services that stood out to us among our massive trove of status page data.

Recently, we began using IP geolocation within StatusGator to learn where are users are located. We are happy to say that it’s working out well. We hoped to use these insights to tune our marketing. To that end, we added the Ahoy gem to help collect information related to how our advertising campaigns are going. The Ahoy gem also uses the geolocation gem to lookup IP addresses. This significantly increased the number of IP geolocation lookups.

StatusGator is built on Ruby on Rails, a popular choice for rapid web application development for more than a decade. One of the many benefits of Rails is its rich ecosystem of open source gems which can provide massive value quickly. We discovered one such gem, Ahoy, on our recent quest to understand how our users find out about StatusGator.