What's a Status Page Aggregator and why you need one
Why Status Page Aggregators are needed in a world of cloud services
Welcome to the future! SaaS (Software as a Service) rules the world. When just a few years ago businesses were buying software and installing it in-house, now they’re renting it. There’s a SaaS for everything. Actually, multiple SaaS for the exact same problem!
Even technology companies with expert engineering teams are choosing to use off-the-shelf components (now in the form of SaaS) instead of developing in-house. It makes complete sense to buy something that would cost 100x more to develop in-house.
The "problem" might be that now, every company needs to rely on other companies to deliver their service. A risk, but usually well worth it. And while each of these services may have a good uptime, at some point in time, there’s also something going on with some of them. After all, things break!
If you go through your list of providers or credit card statements, it is easy to see that your business may be dependent on 30-100 external services, many of them for business-critical processes.
Monitoring your internal system is very standard practice, but what about monitoring your cloud services status (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, …)? This is where a Status Page Aggregator will become very handy!
What is a Status Page?
Most cloud services (and in particular SaaS) now make available a status page, where their clients can check the status of their service, planned maintenance windows, and a history of recent outages and issues, both major and minor.
What is a Status Page Aggregator?
Being able to check the status of your cloud providers on their status pages is reassuring, but no one wants to go 50 different websites to check their status.
That’s where status page aggregators come in. A status page aggregator is a piece of software that does that for you. It aggregates the status of a significant amount of cloud services and provides a way to monitor them from one place. It relies on official information published by companies on their status pages.
Here are some examples of some popular status pages:
Companies use their status pages to communicate with their customers about ongoing issues. This allows them to control the flow of customer support tickets, for example.
How does a Status Page Aggregator work?
The Status Page Aggregator is listening to all of the status pages and pulling any new updates. When there is a status update, it gets that new information, and according to the notification settings, it sends alerts to the proper stakeholders.
Since it knows what services your company uses, so it only notifies you about services that are relevant to you.
Why use a Status Page Aggregator?
When a business relies on cloud services, it is tempting to think nothing needs to be done when they go down. Just sit and wait for them to come back up. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.
Even if there’s nothing you can do to bring the cloud service back online, there’s a lot that must be done inside your business. Employees and business partners need to be notified, a plan B put into motion if it's a business-critical service. IT support systems need to make it clear to users that an outage is occurring to avoid them flooding helpdesk channels with emails, phone calls, instant messages, and tickets that will take hours to clean up afterward.
The following shows a few ways in which a Status Page Aggregator can help:
| Without a Status Page Aggregator (Old way) | With a Status Page Aggregator (e.g. IsDown.app) |
|---|---|
| Need to go to individual status pages to check the status | One single location to monitor all of your cloud services |
| Notifications generally not available (or very hard to maintain up to date) | An easy and consistent way to set up notifications |
| Hard or no way to filter by components | Filter by components. Be notified of issues just in the parts of the service that you use. |
| Hard or no way to filter by severity | Filter by severity of the incidents. Get different notifications for different severity. |
| Hard to define for different stakeholders | Use a dashboard for each stakeholder |
| While vendor status pages may immediately show an issue, interconnected systems make it hard to identify root cause | Be notified of the system that is actually failing, even if the root cause is not apparent |
| Limited number of integrations for notifications | Integration with your current tools that you already use to monitor and alert. Possibility to integrate with IT support systems. |
Conclusion
Cloud services are not going anywhere. And with the increasing complexity of solutions, most businesses are choosing to focus on their core offering and subscribing to almost everything else as a service.
Monitoring external services is as important as monitoring internal tools, since either of them can make your business grind to a halt. Status page aggregators are here to help you and your team know exactly what’s going on and react to it as soon as possible.