🔑 Key points
- Status pages for applications are standard practice.
- Review status page examples in order to get familiar with what they provide.
When your customers have the perspective that your application is unstable or that your company doesn't care about stability, they will quickly find an alternative in your competitors' offering. As a software engineer who cares about quality, you can take several approaches to maintain customer trust:
- Reduce the likelihood of bugs: Focus on good software design principles. Isolate or remove problematic functionality. Keep the system simple.
- Handle failure gracefully: Create circuit breakers that fallback on dependable functionality. Provide redundancy.
- Ensure quality: Invest significantly in testing.
- Respond quickly: Detect and correct failure as rapidly as you can.
- Communicate: Let your customer know what is going on and that you have it under control.
No product is ever going to be completely free of defects. You want to do everything within reason to minimize their impact on the customer, but there comes a point where the investment is not worth the return. That is where Communication comes in. The worst thing you can do is let your customer find out weeks after an incident from a news, or a social media feed, that you suffered an outage, lost data, or were hacked. You want to react to a problem before your customers report it and already have a message automatically generated that conveys confidence in your ability to address the issue.
One common way to communicate with customers is to have a status subdomain that serves as the communication point for customers desiring information.
Here is the Open AI status page.
Notice that they specify when the problem was discovered, what the problem is, and what the current state is. You can even subscribe to receive updates.
Grafana takes things a step further. If there is a serious problem with functionality that they detect you are using, they will display a message banner directly on the impacted page.
Notice that the banner has a link that takes you to their status page where the incident is described in detail.
There are several ways to create a status page for your application. Usually you don't want to have it actually hosted as part of your application because that is kind of self-defeating. Instead, you need to build a completely different stack, hopefully hosted in a completely different environment from your application.
As an alternative to building your own status page, you can use one of the many cloud services that are available. There are also lots of open source projects that make it easy to deploy a status page.
One that is free and easy to set up is upptime. Upptime makes extensive use of GitHub. A scheduled GitHub Actions workflow monitors the website and updates GitHub Pages to display the status. GitHub Issues are used to track an incident and the results are automatically integrated into the status page.
💡 If you are looking for a curiosity project, this might be a good one to try.