Automatic status reports and updates

If you wish to automatically post incident updates to your status page, you will need to enable Automatic status page updates.

• Go to Status Pages.
• Select a status page.
• Scroll down to Advanced settings > Automatic status page updates.
• Tick Automatically create status page updates for new incidents.

Editing an ongoing incident's status update will turn it into a manual status update. This means that once the incident is resolved, you will manually need to add a status update with Resolved status.

How automatic reports are grouped

Automatic status reports are grouped by day, in UTC. A service that goes down repeatedly gets one report and one e-mail thread for the day rather than one per outage. A new incident is added to your latest automatic report as a new status update if that report is still ongoing or was last updated the same day. Otherwise, the incident opens a new report.

When several incidents share a report:

• The report's title names the services from all of its incidents, including services that have already recovered.
• Each service is described by the worst state it reached, for example "API is down; Dashboard is degraded".
• Subscribers get the report's e-mails in one thread. The thread keeps the subject of its first e-mail, and each e-mail shows the report's current title.

Want a separate report for each incident?

Turn off Automatically create status page updates for new incidents and create a status report for each incident yourself.

Manual status page report

Status page reports allow you to communicate more details about an incident.

They usually include information such as ETA for resolution or a detailed overview of which services are unavailable and which are degraded.

Status page reports typically consist of multiple status updates.

Adding a new status report to your status page

• Go to Status pages.
• Pick the status page you want to add the report to.
• Switch to the Status updates tab.
• Click Create status report.
• Fill out the What's going on? and the Description fields.
• Select the start of the incident in the Published at section.
• (Small Team plan onward) Select if you want to notify subscribers.
• Select the Downtime or Degraded status for the affected monitors using the dropdown menu.
• Click Create report.

Custom domain sender

To connect a custom domain that will send status page update e-mails instead of the default Better Stack domain, let us know at hello@betterstack.com and we'll be happy to assist with the setup.

Status update

The status update marks a changed status or the end of an incident.

When an incident happens, the best practice is to create a status page report stating that a specific service is Degraded or that there is Downtime. Once the incident is resolved, a status update should be added to the current status report, stating that the incident is now Resolved.

Adding a new status update to your status page

• Go to Status pages.
• Pick the status page you want to add the status update to.
• Go to the Status updates tab.
• Click open the ongoing incident's status report.
• Click Create status update.
• Fill out the Message field.
• (Small Team plan onward) Select if you want to notify subscribers.
• Select Degraded or Resolved status for the affected monitors using the dropdown menu.
• Click Create update.

Example

Let's say that one of the monitored websites has gone down completely. What happens is that the monitor on the status page turns red.

We will need to create a new status report to give our users more insight. Let's say there has been a downtime incident. We will create a new status report called Homepage is unavailable and change the status of the homepage monitor from not affected to Downtime. You can also briefly describe the incident, such as: "The example.com website is down for all users".

Then, we can start investigating the issue, and once we have an update (for example, when we see that our cloud provider is having problems), we can create a status update containing this information. Make sure that the status of the affected services in the dropdown menu is still Downtime.

When our cloud provider fixes the issue, and the homepage comes back up, we can create a new (and final) status update, switching the status of the affected services using the dropdown menu from Downtime or Degradation to Resolved.

Create status reports from an incident

An unresolved incident's timeline offers a Create status report form for the published status pages that list one of the incident's services, such as its monitor or heartbeat. Each form comes prefilled from the incident, with the incident's services set to Downtime or Degraded.

• Open the incident in Incidents.
• In the Timeline, review the prefilled form for your status page, including Notify status page subscribers.
• Click Create status report.

Once posted, the report shows as a card in the timeline, along with any other status report about the incident. To post the next status update:

• Click Create status update on the report's latest card.
• Write the Message and adjust the affected services.
• Click Create status update.

No form for your status page?

The timeline shows forms for up to three status pages, and none for a page with automatic status reports or with an ongoing report that already covers the incident. Create the status report or the next status update from the status page instead.