What a Good Status Page Should Tell You (And What Most Get Wrong)
The difference between a status page that's actually useful during an outage and a marketing page pretending to be one — from a monitoring service that reads hundreds every day.
Every SaaS company has a "status page" now. Very few of them are honest about what's actually happening. Here's what a useful status page contains and the tricks the bad ones use to look better than they are.
What a useful status page shows
- Component-level breakdown — not just "API" but "authentication, checkout, admin dashboard, webhook delivery"
- Region-specific status — a US-East outage isn't a full outage for EU users
- Real-time updates during incidents — a status page that goes hours between updates during a live incident is worse than none
- Historical incidents at least 90 days back, with root-cause postmortems
- Uptime percentages calculated honestly — not just "core API" while everything else is degraded
Red flags on a status page
- Green across the board while users are actively reporting problems (see our live reports)
- Incidents only opened after users complain publicly
- "Investigating" status that never advances to "Identified" or "Resolved"
- Incidents that vanish from history after resolution
- Uptime numbers that don't match the incident log
Why third-party monitoring matters
Official status pages are run by the same company having the outage. During major incidents, the status page itself sometimes goes down, or gets updated late because engineering is busy actually fixing things. Independent monitors like Down For All Or Just Me probe from outside the affected network and reflect what real users see — usually before the official status page updates.
How to use both together
When you suspect an outage, check both: the official page tells you what the company acknowledges; independent monitors and user reports tell you the reality. If they disagree, trust the independent data.
For teams running their own status page
- Host it on a completely separate infrastructure from your main app
- Automate incident creation from monitoring — don't wait for a human to click "New Incident"
- Update every 15 minutes during active incidents, even if the update is "still investigating"
- Publish honest postmortems within a week — customers respect transparency
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