Status Page Aggregation: How to Aggregate Status Pages?

status page aggregation

What is status page aggregation?

If you’re managing IT or infrastructure these days, you almost certainly depend on dozens of hosted services or cloud applications. From major cloud services like Amazon, Azure, or Google, to customer service tools and marketing platforms, your business depends on the uptime of others. Each of these services publishes a status page where they warn about maintenance, outages, and performance issues but can you keep track of all of those at the same time?

Status page aggregation gives you critically needed transparency by collecting the status of all of the services and vendors you depend on and displaying them in one place. You can manually cobble together this transparency using each status page’s subscription capabilities, when available. But this process inevitably turns into a complicated mess of custom scripts and unreliable tools. This is why organizations turn to a status page aggregator.

StatusGator Eats Support Tickets for Lunch

What is a status page?

A status page is a web page that provides real-time information about the current status of a system or service. Customers of that service use the status page to stay up to date on the health of their vendor. End users can use the status page to find out if a service is down or experiencing particular issues.

Some companies choose to build their own custom status page, while others use one of many off-the-shelf status page providers. Either way, all status pages should include the following:

  • A concise description of the service being monitored
  • A real-time indicator of the current status (green for up, red for down, etc.)
  • A timeline of all recent (and perhaps historical) incidents
  • The ability for users to subscribe, so they can be notified whenever the status changes.

Why do you need to aggregate status pages? 

  • To provide information on all the services connected with your organization, in one place
  • As a source for live updates and notifications that can be sent to users and stakeholders as soon as issues arise
  • To improve coordination between different teams responsible for different parts of a service
  • To have a single source of information when outages and issues arise. 

Who needs it?

All sorts of organizations aggregate status pages in order to keep all stakeholders informed about the current state of all their vendors. This is especially important for mission-critical services, where even a few minutes of downtime can have major consequences. By aggregating multiple status pages into one central location, you can ensure that your team, stakeholders, and users always have the most up-to-date information about the services on which your organization relies.

How to aggregate status pages

Option 1 – StatusGator

StatusGator demo dashboard

StatusGator offers both free and premium plans. Simply sign up for an account and choose the services you want to monitor, and StatusGator automatically checks the status of each service and displays any outages or issues on your own personal dashboard. You can also set up Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, or SMS alerts so that you always know about any problems as soon as they arise. Advanced integrations are possible with StatusGator’s webhooks and API.

StatusGator allows one-click access to historical data about a service over a given period, including uptime and downtime. This feature is especially useful if you’re trying to determine whether an issue is continually recurring or has been permanently resolved.

Pros 

  • Free plan option
  • Data is cleaned, enriched, standardized, and aggregated
  • Easy, ready-to-use solution
  • Paid plan includes historical data and uptime monitoring
  • Reliable infrastructure, backups, and customer support
  • Component filters, API, status overwrite, and upcoming maintenance notifications
  • Multiple customization options to fit your specific needs
  • Public, private status pages, and secure viewing options
  • Monitors almost 2,000 services
  • Dedicated team to handle status page scraping updates

Cons

  • Some features are only available on a paid plan
  • Free plan only allows one user
  • Included status page offering is simple
Every Cloud Vendor's Status in One Place

Option 2 – the DIY solution

There are two main components to your status page aggregator: the checker and the display. The checker is responsible for periodically checking the status of your services and storing the results. The display then takes these results and presents them to your users in an easily understandable format.

There are many different ways to set up your checker and your display. The checker can either use a simple script or a more sophisticated monitoring system (like StatusGator!). The display can be a status page hosted by a third-party service, or you can set up your own status page on your website.

If you choose to aggregate status pages yourself, first you’ll need to choose a central location for your status page – this is the display element – which can be a simple webpage that you host on your own server or an existing service like StatusPage.io. 

StatusGato_Statusoage_website_screenshot
StatusPage.io

Then you have to implement the checker. You’ll need to access every status page relevant to your organization and subscribe to updates for each of them individually. Often, the problem here is that some pages don’t allow subscriptions; in which case, you’ll have to write your own script that scrapes data from status pages, and/or reverse-engineer APIs. It’s not the easiest thing to do, can result in inaccurate or limited data, and takes a lot of work to maintain.

Pros

  • More affordable than a pre-made solution
  • Flexibility to customize everything
  • Satisfaction of doing it yourself

Cons

  • Takes time to set up and configure
  • May not be as reliable as paid solutions
  • Lack of support if something goes wrong
  • Requires regular monitoring and bespoke updates to ensure reliability

If you have the time and expertise to set up and maintain a DIY solution, it can be a great option for keeping your users informed of any emerging issues. It can also be a fun and rewarding task if you have enough time.

However, if you’re not experienced with coding or website development, a pre-made solution makes a lot more sense. It instantly removes a whole chunk of extra work, and you have the peace of mind of using a dedicated system that is monitored for you.

Either way, the most important thing is that your users; team members; and IT helpdesk, DevOps, and SRE teams always have access to a reliable and up-to-date status page.

Option 3 – small StatusGator copycats

There is also always the option of using one of the many StatusGator-style services that regularly pop up, such as StatusTicker. 

StatusGator_StatusTicker_dashboard_screenshoot
StatusTicker dashboard

Downosaur was a popular service but is now defunct and no longer available. This is a high-risk route. StatusGator is reliable and has been in business since 2015.

If you’re not sure you have the expertise to choose and set up the right status page aggregator, or indeed the time to monitor it, you’re probably better off choosing the most credible, market-leading option, as smaller services don’t enjoy the same level of support and monitoring as StatusGator. 

Pros

  • Free or cheap to use

Cons

  • Do not offer the level of data or information about outages and issues
  • Unreliable data: Most alternatives to StatusGator don’t use official status data
  • Regular monitoring and updates required due to unreliable data
  • Limited number of services and customization options
  • Lack of important features such as component filtering 
  • Many of these services don’t last (including StatusGator imitator Downosaur) 
  • Limited customer support, especially with free plans.
StatusGator Eats Support Tickets for Lunch

The best status page aggregator

#1 – StatusGator

If you’re looking for a status page aggregator, then your first port of call should definitely be StatusGator. It’s the best because it offers a number of features that other status page aggregators simply don’t. Some of the key features include:

  • A simple and easy-to-use interface, seamlessly keeping you and your users informed of any outages or issues 
  • No limit on the number of status pages you can track
  • Excellent customer support
  • Real-time updates and historical data for 1,500+ status pages (more than other similar services)
  • Advanced and complex data aggregation and enrichment algorithms 
  • Component filters, status page overrides, API, and other great features

#2 – The DIY solution

Setting up your own system to automatically check the status of all your different services and display them in one central location can be very rewarding if you’re the DIY type. Just be aware that it requires some work upfront and also ongoing maintenance to keep scrapers up to date with changes to page formats.

#3 – Small StatusGator copycats

There are smaller alternatives to StatusGator, but they offer limited status aggregation. Most of these applications don’t use official data, and being small startups, they are much more likely to disappear or offer patchy service, inadequate customer service, or late updates. They also lack the full range of features and the trusted reliability of the original StatusGator. 

Final thoughts

Status page aggregation is a necessary part of staying on top of outages for DevOps, SRE, and IT teams. End users for many businesses and non-profit organizations can benefit from it as well. It is possible to set up a status page aggregator yourself, but first, consider how much you rely on accurate information regarding services that are crucial to your business. Are you tech-savvy enough – and do you have enough time – to make sure your aggregation page is accurate now and continues to be reliable in the future? If not, you are likely to benefit from the convenience of a dedicated, robust, and feature-rich product like StatusGator. Join the community!

FAQ on Status Page Aggregation

How to aggregate status pages?
Use StatusGator — the most trusted status page aggregator on the market.   If you prefer a DIY solution for status page aggregation, you will need a location to display the statuses, e.g., a simple self-hosted website, and a script that checks the status of services within a certain period and stores data to be displayed.

Is there a free status page aggregator?
Yes, StatusGator has a free plan that allows aggregating 3 status pages.  Also, a free trial of any paid plan is available for 14 days.

What is StatusGator alternative?
Services like Downosaur and StatusTicker are considered to be StatusGator alternatives. However, some of these services use user-generated reports of issues, while StatusGator uses only official information issued by vendors. StatusGator was designed with business needs in mind, so it provides numerous indispensable features.

How to collect the statuses of all of the services and vendors and display them in one place?
To collect the statuses of several vendors, you can use StatusGator. Or you can subscribe to those status pages, build a scraper or use reverse engineering of APIs. Then display the data on the webpage. However, StatusGator is a preferred solution because it has many useful features and integrations.

How to display the statuses of several vendors in one place?
The status page aggregator displays real-time data about the status of several services or vendors. The most trusted solution is StatusGator. It has 1,700 services available for monitoring and uses only official data from the vendors themselves.

Is making your own status page aggregator easy?
The potential issue may arise from services that don’t provide an option to subscribe to their status pages, therefore building a data scraper and/or reverse engineering of APIs might be needed.
Also, you will need a host for your display of the statuses.
Building on your own can be complicated even more due to the necessity of continuous maintenance of DIY-solution.
StatusGator takes care of all of those issues. Fast setup, timely updates of statuses from the official services, team access, and historical data are all available within 5 minutes spent on creating an account.

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