This post discusses status pages for cloud service providers. The post is also available in my podcast.
Introduction to status pages
It is a best practice for every cloud service provider (and more generally any company offering cloud services to end-users, such as an independent cloud software vendor) to operate a Web application called status page, through which to communicate in real time the status of their services to the end customers and users.
Status page features
The status page is meant to be linked with the service provider's homepage so that customers can have quick access to real-time information related to the status of the service provider's services. The MSP services can be organized into logical groups, such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or DaaS services. Service provider operators can add the following two main types of events:
- Incidents. Any type of technical issue which affects the availability of the MSP services is regarded an incident and should be recorded and monitored via the status page. The MSP team records information such as the start and end time of the incident, steps which were taken to resolve it as well as a root cause analysis. The incident could be caused by either the MSP infrastructure or by third party vendors and infrastructure providers, such as other Cloud service providers or network uplink providers.
- Maintenance. Maintenance tasks can be either scheduled on a periodical basis or emergency, in case there is an urgent security fix or bug fix which must be applied asap to the production systems. In either case, the MSP team notifies the end users of the tasks which are scheduled to be carried out as well as the expected timeframe for service downtime.
A status page can generally be either manually monitored and updated by the MSP team or make use of integrated status page APIs to automate the availability reporting by leveraging a series of agents on the monitored systems and services.
Status page examples
The following are only examples of status pages of some of the world's largest public cloud service providers.
- https://status.office365.com/
- https://status.azure.com/en-us/status
- https://status.cloud.google.com/
- https://cloud.ibm.com/status?selected=status
- https://status.aws.amazon.com/
- https://status.vmware-services.io/
- https://status.cloud.com/
- https://status.redhat.com/
- https://ocistatus.oraclecloud.com/
Status page services
There are various status page services offered by cloud vendors. Some of the most notable ones are the following:
- https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage
- https://statuscast.com/status-page-for-managed-service-providers/
- https://status.io/
- http://cachethq.io/
- https://docs.statusfy.co/
- https://statuspal.io/
- https://www.sorryapp.com/
- https://www.freshworks.com/status-page/
- https://uptimerobot.com/status-page/
- https://www.adminlabs.com/status-page/components/
Other services provide an aggregation of the real time status of public Cloud services. Using these services, you can set up your own status page a Managed Services Provider, (MSP). Some examples are:
- https://cloudharmony.com/status
- https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/
- http://downrightnow.com/
