Key concepts
Here are a few concepts that'll help you better understand StatusPal and how you can take advantage of it.
Status Page
A status page is a website, separate from your main website and infrastructure, that your customer can visit in the event that you experience any technical issues with your product or service.
On your status page, customers can find out not only about incidents but also about maintenance windows and, most importantly, the current status of your services.
It's common for companies to have one status page where they report the incidents of all their products and services. However, other companies might need multiple status pages, like one per product, service, or customer.
Service/component
Your product or application (the one your status page is about) might have multiple services that comprise it or that it relies on. You'll want to represent them in your status page so that you are able to report incidents that affect them individually.
You don't need to expose all of your services, but the ones you want your customers or stakeholders to be aware of their status.
Another thing you can do with the services you configure in your status page is monitor them, we can notify you and even automatically create an incident when they go down, to find out more read Configure monitoring for a service.
Incident
An incident report allows you to communicate to your customers that something is wrong in your system, either something that causes general downtime, slow responsiveness, data inconsistency, etc.
Incident severity
When you create an incident, you can select its severity in the type field. By default, it can be Minor or Major:
Minor Incident: We recommend this type of incident when it does not cause downtime on your system, and your customers can still use your site, perhaps with some annoyance.
Major Incident: If the incident is causing downtime and/or disrupting the normal use of your systems.
These are the default incident types we provide you by default, but you can configure custom incident types by accessing Incidents > Types from the sidebar.
Scheduled Maintenance
Scheduled maintenance is a special kind of incident, mostly because it's something that is planned, even if it will cause system disruption.
A good example of scheduled maintenance is if you want to switch DNS providers, and you know this will cause some downtime, you should communicate this to your customers ahead of time so they can take preventive measures beforehand.
You can do this with a scheduled maintenance; when you create them, we can notify your subscribers with the schedule you entered for the maintenance; we also display the maintenance a week ahead, so your customers get informed.
Once the scheduled time comes, your status page automatically reflects that your system is under maintenance.
Subscribers
Subscribers are customers or stakeholders that subscribe to your status page to receive notifications about your site's status; once they subscribe, they will receive a notification whenever you create or update an incident/maintenance as long as you check the box "Notify subscribers."
They can easily opt out with a link provided in every notification they will receive; you also have the option to remove them from your subscriber list.
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