We’re always singing the praises of downtime communication. Customers deserve transparency and clear information, especially when things aren’t running as expected.
But reporting downtime can sting. It’s easy for people to use your updates to draw negative conclusions about your service, or even your entire business, if they only hear from you when things break.
We know the hard work that goes into making a web service available 99+ percent of the time. In fact, if you’re savvy enough to be thinking about downtime reporting, you probably have some pretty excellent uptime.
But that hard work typically goes unrecognized. Instead people are stuck staring at an update about those three minutes your API was down two months ago.
In a world where every service interruption is under the microscope, building a highly-available service at scale is a competitive advantage. Traditionally there hasn’t been a great way to show this off.
That’s why we’re excited to announce a new feature today called Uptime Showcase, a visual, easy-to-understand way to show off the historic health of your service.
“One of our driving principles at CircleCI is being open and transparent with our customers. Statuspage is a critical part of our customer communication. We were always interested in sharing uptime publicly, but didn’t have an easy way to do so before. Now we have one source of truth on uptime for both our customers and our internal team.”
— Bear, SRE Manager, CircleCI
Status pages in the buyer’s journey
Whether you plan for it or not, at some point in the buying process prospects are checking out your service reliability. Recent major outages like the Dyn DDoS attack and Amazon’s S3 outage have brought cloud reliability to the forefront of the checklist for SaaS buyers.
Uptime and incident communication is playing a bigger and bigger role in buying decisions for both B2B and B2C customers. This is only getting more critical as the trend of companies adopting cloud services accelerates.
“We enabled Uptime Showcase to tell our customers that we take uptime seriously. The all-green Uptime Showcase is a badge of honor, while some orange or red stripes shows that we will always be honest about our status. The feature also makes it really easy for our potential customers to feel safe that we care about uptime. It builds trust by showing the history for our most critical components in one quick view. It’s a big win for Matterport.”— Håkon Erichsen, Chief Architect at Matterport
It’s easy to make impressive promises about future uptime and SLAs. But nothing instills confidence in future reliability as well as proof from past performance. By showing service reliability with Uptime Showcase, you’re building the credibility future customers want to see when they inevitably evaluate your uptime. Telling your uptime story on your own terms is a huge advantage — especially if your competitors aren’t telling theirs.
For live examples, take a look at the status pages of CircleCI, Wistia, Gusto, Reddit, and Squarespace.
How does it work?
For a day with no degraded performance or outages for a given component, a green mark is displayed. When degraded, the color gradient will change to represent the severity of the issue (from green to red). You can also hover over any colored bar to see details for that day. For a deeper dive into the inner workings of Uptime Showcase, head over to our knowledge base article.
Uptime Showcase also comes with a new calendar view inside your incident history page. Here your visitors can view your historic availability by month and scroll through prior months.
Getting started
Uptime Showcase is now available for all customers and can be enabled within your Statuspage Dashboard. To get started, log in to your Statuspage account and you’ll be prompted with a quick setup guide. If you’re not a Statuspage customer and would like to test the feature out for yourself, start here with a free trial!
For any Uptime Showcase feedback or questions, feel free to email hi@statuspage.io.