Status Page System: what is it, and which is better

To solve the problems that a system may have, the administrator should know what the causes are. And for this it is necessary to monitor some relevant data that can indicate what is happening. So that you have them all centralized and at your disposal, you can use software such as status page system or status pages.

If you wonder what a status page system is, say that these tools are essential for online services, providing indices and downtime, with which to detect problems, improve user confidence, and save time in management. In addition, there are many projects that are completely free and open source.

Options for a status page system

When creating a status page for your website or service, you can choose to two options:

• A paid service like Instatus to automate all the hard work. Letting the service provider create, host and maintain this page for you.
• Use a free and open source system to self-host your status page. In this case, you will have to host it yourself and take care of its management.

However, although the second option may seem more complicated, it may have some and advantages:

• Free, without any investment.
• Being open source it is very flexible.
• You can host it yourself, something that may seem like a disadvantage, but it allows you to choose the hosting platform.
• Unlimited team members and subscribers, as you control this. In the paid ones there may be limitations.
• Open source community support.

For other companies, maybe pages like Instatus could have advantages:

• Ease and comfort.
• Helpdesk if something goes wrong.
• Accommodation and maintenance.
• Integration of some third party services.

What to look for when choosing a status page?

When you go to choose a status page system, it is important that you look at a series of characteristics to make a good choice. Some of the most important are:

• It must provide complete and transparent service status information.
• Automatic monitoring capacity, as well as manual planning and updating if required.
• Show uptime metrics.
• Notification system or alerts for subscribers.

The best 3

If you want to create a new status page for your project or company, and you want it to be open source and free to use, here you go. the 3 most recommended:

• Stamp: a status page system developed by James Brooks and under the BSD license and that is capable of listing your services, reporting incidents, it is customizable, simple and powerful, with JSON API, metrics in its dashboard to see the general status, available in several languages , subscriber notifications by email, supports two-step authentication, and can work on both a PC and a mobile device.
• uptime: Created by Anand Chowdhary and licensed under MIT. This other system status page allows you to monitor online time every 5 minutes, monitor unlimited web pages, record parameters and generate graphs, incident reporting system, ability to report via Telegram or Slack, and with a modern look and feel. simple to understand.
• statping-ng: developed by Statping NG and under the GNU GPLv3 license, this other system has a visual frontend in which you receive notifications every time services are offline, it allows you to customize styles, such as color schemes, you can catalog services in groups, interface simple graph, ability to notify by Telegram, Slack, Discord, email, etc., and with RESTful API to monitor services such as HTTP, TCP, UDP, and gRPC protocols.