We are planning to add “public status pages” as a built-in feature to Uptime Robot. Yet, there are services which are specialized in this area, offering advanced features and already work with Uptime Robot.

We’re happy to announce the completion of our integration with one of them: StatusCast. This will allow Uptime Robot customers to create their own end user-facing application status pages which update automatically from application performance monitors in Uptime Robot’s system.

This will help with managing customer expectations without increasing your team’s workload, as our integration with StatusCast makes it easier to communicate fulfillment of your SLA and put the rare service disruption into the larger context of consistently excellent performance.

StatusCast’s hosted status pages update in real-time and allow for rules-based or manual edits to ensure the wording and the timing of your updates are appropriate for your end user audience.

The goal is to extend the value Uptime Robot provides by taking the information your team is already receiving and applying it to solve another common demand placed upon IT/DevOps teams.

Why do end users care?

It’s frustrating when your software application is inaccessible or experiences performance issues.

While you know that happens rarely rather than never, and that the real metrics should be the speed and thoroughness with which an issue is resolved rather than the fact that the rare issue occurred at all, customers may not know this until it is visible.

Why should you care?

Whether the customer is right or not in their presumption about the disruption in your application, their negative feelings are going to hurt your reputation and your customer retention.

Your challenge then is to fix the problem as quickly as possible, while communicating to end users and internal staff (e.g. Customer Support, Executive team, etc.) about the scope of the issue, how much progress you’re making, and when full functionality can be restored. This level of transparency, attention, and professionalism helps to mitigate your customers’ frustration.

Uptime Robot already helps you with the first part of that challenge, by enabling you to quickly identify the nature of the disruption. Our new integration with StatusCast lightens the communications portion of that burden as well, by translating the application monitoring data you’re already getting from Uptime Robot into information that makes sense to your end users and non-technical colleagues. This leaves your team free to focus on what they do best: fixing the problem!

How does it work?

Application performance information is pushed from Uptime Robot to your hosted status page. StatusCast allows you to set up rules-based automation and privacy settings so that the right information gets to the right people (as not all application performance data is relevant to or appropriate for all users).

End users are also able to subscribe to updates via email, social media (Twitter, etc.), SMS text message, etc., as that is often more convenient for them than checking a status page.

We want your feedback!

You can give the StatusCast integration a try (they have both free and paid plans) and let us know what you think. Again, our goal is to extend the value that can be received from Uptime Robot! Please let us know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.