It’s time for another update from the StatusGator team! While our team was hard at work on improvements and bug fixes, many communities around the United States spent October cleaning up from the impact of hurricanes. If you’d like to help, we’d ask you to join us in supporting our friends and customers in Buncombe County, North Carolina by donating to the Buncombe County Schools Foundation. Thank you for support and now let’s get into what’s new.

Learn the best practices for IT incident communication via status pages, covering key aspects such as Defining incidents, Preparing communication plans, and Using various communication channels.

Dealing with disruptions from third-party providers can really disrupt your business operations. As our IT infrastructures become more complex, managing these outages can be quite a headache. If you're a site reliability engineer (SRE) looking for a smoother way to handle these incidents, you'll want to check out the new Rootly and IsDown integration. Rootly is an incident management system that seriously speeds up business response times.

We’ve just rolled out a new Check Now feature for Website and Ping monitors! This lets you manually check the current status of your monitor instantly, right from the admin board. Whether you’re monitoring a Website or using a Ping monitor, this option provides the most up-to-date status when you need it. To access the Check Now feature, simply go to your Monitors page, find the Website or Ping monitor you’d like to check, and click the three dots icon next to it.

We’ve made some updates to the status page layout, allowing users to easily access important monitor details like Uptime History and Components across all layout types, including the 2-column and 3-column views.

We’ve made an upgrade to the “Check for Content” feature in our website monitors! Previously, users could select just one location at a time from US West, US East, EU West, and AU East via radio buttons. Now you can monitor your content from multiple locations instead of just one. By choosing multiple regions you can ensure that transient network issues don’t cause your monitor to go down unexpectedly.

Modern businesses rely on a variety of external services to support their operations, including APIs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment gateways, and more. Whether it's pulling data from an external API, using a cloud service for storage, or integrating a third-party tool for analytics, these services help achieve many business objectives. Given their criticality, it’s important to have a reliable mechanism for monitoring external services.

Maintaining transparent communication about service availability is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Status pages are an important part of your communication strategy during times of outages and maintenance events. You can choose to go with a fully managed status page provider, or host an open-source one yourself. Open source status page providers offer a cost-effective and customizable solution. However, then can come with their own drawbacks.

This blog will explore how to maximize the benefits of a status page, ensuring it enhances user trust, reduces customer support queries, and streamlines incident management.

StatusGator is the world’s best status page aggregator: We aggregate the status of thousands of cloud services and hosted applications from their official status pages. But everyone knows official status pages are often behind and in those critical moments before the status page is updated, you might be thinking “Is it just me? Or is it really down?” StatusGator’s Early Warning Signals solves that by alerting you before providers even acknowledge the incident.