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Table of Contents:
Kevin and Mai’s Dilemma
Meet Kevin and Mai (again): Navigating the Troublesome Waters of Platform Downtime.
Kevin is a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), constantly on the lookout for potential downtime that could impact their platform, kryptobro.com. Mai is his adept partner, ever-ready to troubleshoot.
In their journey, the previous version of Squadcast Status Pages served as a helpful tool, but they soon found room for improvements:
The duo hosts a Public Status Page that displays services tied to specific technical components. These components, however, do not always impact the customer experience. Kevin and Mai wish for a more user-focused approach where they can choose which Public Components to showcase, untethered from specific services.
In previous Status Pages, any open incident, regardless of importance, determined the status of services shown on the Status Page. This sometimes led to miscommunication with the Customer Success and Marketing teams as they sent out the communication to customers that a critical outage had occurred but that was not the case. What they desire is more control over the content displayed, allowing for more relevant and accurate communication.
As operators of a cryptocurrency platform, they are aware of how crucial uptime is for their customers, shareholders, and the entire organization. They wanted a way to demonstrate the considerable efforts they invest in reducing downtime.
When maintenance windows are scheduled, the Customer Success team is flooded with tickets on why a certain service is down. Kevin and Mai believe there must be a better way to publicize maintenance schedules through Status Pages, thereby managing customer expectations.
In order to create different incident communication protocols for internal and external stakeholders, they have segregated the Public and Private Status Pages, with the latter requiring password access.
They sought out more customization options, rather than inundating their internal teams with updates during incidents, they prefer a system where teams can opt to receive updates about ongoing incidents or upcoming maintenance. This would keep the teams informed.
Introducing Squadcast’s Enhanced Status Pages
Kevin and Mai's requirements resonated with many of you, and we took notice. Consequently, we've upgraded our Status Pages to provide you with easy setup, more granular control, and increased customization options!
In the following sections, we'll dive deep into the changes and new functionalities you can expect with our updated offering.
Key Changes
- Decoupled association: Your services are no longer tied to specific components (see image A). This means, you now have complete freedom to showcase your public components in any way you prefer (see image B), allowing for a more customizable and standalone feature.
Image (A)
Image (B)
Status Page independence: Open incidents will no longer dictate the content displayed on the Status Page. This change gives you more autonomy in deciding what information to present, ensuring that the Status Page accurately reflects your desired messaging.
Separate creation of issues: You can now create issues separately from incidents in Squadcast, streamlining your workflow and enabling more efficient management.
New Functionalities
Full Control of What You Want to Display on Your Status Page
With our new Status Pages, you now have the freedom to manually add, name, and group Components. For instance, if kryptobro.com has a mobile application, different Components, such as SDKs and APIs, can be created and Grouped under "Mobile Application." Correcting typos and rearranging the order of Components is a breeze. Moreover, for tailored tracking, your users can subscribe to specific Components.
Experience increased customization, choose from five Status messages for your components.
Demonstrate Reliability
The expanded Component view now displays a 90-day Service Uptime history, showcasing your Reliability. Each Service Uptime graph has hover info that shows the impact of the issue and how long it lasted.
Showcase Planned Downtimes to Build Trust
The Maintenance Window for each Component can now be displayed on the Status Page. Viewers of your Status Page can not only see upcoming and completed Maintenance Windows but also subscribe to receive Maintenance dates. No more surprises 😊
Easily Understand Issue Progress
Your end customers of the Status Page(s) can now easily understand the progression of Issues with an Issue Header and progression updates. In case, there are any open incidents, they go on the top of the Status Page. With these changes, Mai can put aside her coding skills and focus on her sword-fighting abilities (just in case)
Subscriber Management
As the administrator of a Status Page, you're now in the driver's seat. You have the control over both the channels (Email and Webhooks) and the specifics (Components and Maintenance Updates ) available to your subscribers.
Enhanced Security
Private Status Pages now boast enhanced security with the introduction of password authentication.
Improved Status Pages retain previous features, such as:
Conclusion
With the flexibility to customize and organize Components, Groups, Issues, display Maintenance Windows, Subscriber Management and more, the new Status Pages make it easy to monitor system health and keep stakeholders informed. Try Squadcast Status Pages, check out documentation to get started.