Blog
Guides, tool comparisons and short answers about status pages, uptime monitoring, incidents, on-call and the providers you depend on.
- Guide
How to migrate from Atlassian Statuspage in 2026
Use Sentivel's importer to move components, incident history and email subscribers from Atlassian Statuspage or Instatus, then add monitors and move your domain.
- Guide
How to create a status page in 2026
Eight steps to a working status page: components, monitoring, branding, visibility, your own domain, subscriptions, providers, and publishing.
- Guide
Status page examples for every use case (2026)
Public status pages from GitHub, Cloudflare, Stripe and others, grouped by type of product, with what each does well and how to build the same layout in Sentivel.
- Guide
Status page best practices in 2026
Nine habits of status pages that customers rely on, from monitoring-backed status to maintenance notices and provider attribution, with how each works in Sentivel.
- Comparison
The 10 best status page tools in 2026
Ten status page tools compared by what they include: monitoring, on-call, and tracking of the providers you depend on. Written by Sentivel, which is in the list.
- Comparison
6 best Atlassian Statuspage alternatives in 2026
Six alternatives to Atlassian Statuspage, grouped by the reason you're switching: monitoring included, a lower price, self-hosting, or provider outages explained to customers.
- Comparison
6 best Better Stack alternatives in 2026
Six alternatives to Better Stack, grouped by the reason you're switching: predictable pricing, a status page on its own, provider outages explained to customers, or self-hosting.
- Comparison
5 best Instatus alternatives in 2026
Five alternatives to Instatus, grouped by the reason you're switching: stronger monitoring and on-call, provider outages explained to customers, a mature incident workflow, or self-hosting.
- Comparison
6 best UptimeRobot alternatives in 2026
Six alternatives to UptimeRobot, grouped by the reason you're switching: a branded status page, real on-call, fewer false alarms, provider outages explained to customers, or self-hosting.
- Question
How much does a status page cost?
Anywhere from free to hundreds of dollars a month. Open-source tools are free if you host them yourself. Hosted tools start free or at a few dollars a month and cost more as subscribers, seats and monitors grow. Sentivel has a free plan that includes monitoring and a custom domain, and paid plans for larger teams.
- Question
How do I monitor an API?
Point an HTTP monitor at a health endpoint and check it every one to two minutes. Check the status code, the response time and, optionally, a keyword in the body, so a 200 that returns an error page still fails. Require a few failures in a row before alerting, so one failed check doesn't page anyone.
- Question
How do I monitor SSL certificate expiry?
Use a monitor that reads the certificate on your domain and warns you a set number of days before it expires, often 14 to 30. When a certificate expires, every visitor gets a browser warning and most leave. Sentivel checks certificate validity when it monitors an HTTPS endpoint.
- Question
What is keyword monitoring?
Keyword monitoring checks that a word or phrase is present (or absent) in a response, as well as checking the status code. It catches a page that returns 200 while showing an error, a login wall or a maintenance message. You choose a word that always appears on a healthy page, and the check fails when it's missing.
- Question
How do I calculate uptime percentage?
Divide uptime by total time and multiply by 100. A 30-day month has 43,200 minutes, so 43 minutes of downtime gives about 99.9%. The harder part is deciding what counts as down: which components, and whether planned maintenance is excluded. Pick a method, publish it, and use it every month.
- Question
What is an on-call rotation?
An on-call rotation is a schedule where team members take turns responding to alerts, so one person isn't covering every night. It hands over on a fixed cadence, often weekly, and allows one-off overrides for swaps and time off. Alerts go to whoever is on call at that moment.
- Question
How do I reduce alert fatigue?
Only page for things a person has to act on. Require several failed checks in a row before alerting, check from more than one region so a single network blip doesn't open an incident, and route low-severity issues somewhere that doesn't wake anyone. Each false page makes the team a little slower to respond to the next one.
- Question
What is a blameless postmortem?
A blameless postmortem looks at the systems and conditions that allowed an incident to happen and leaves individuals out of it. People can then describe what they saw and did without worrying about consequences, which is how the real causes come out. It assumes everyone acted reasonably with what they knew at the time.
- Question
What is MTTR (mean time to resolution)?
MTTR is the average time from the start of an incident to its resolution, across a set of incidents. It measures how quickly you recover, which is what customers notice. Two related measures are mean time to detect (how fast you notice) and mean time to acknowledge (how fast someone responds).
- Question
What should I write in an incident update?
Start with the impact: what is affected and who notices. Then say what you know about the cause (or that you're investigating), what you're doing, and when the next update will be. Keep it short, skip the jargon, and don't promise what you can't check. Post a resolution update at the end. Sentivel can draft each update in this format for you to review.
- Question
What is a component on a status page?
A component is one part of your product listed on the status page with its own status, such as API, Dashboard or Payments. Components let the page show exactly what is affected, where a single indicator would cover the whole service. Use the names customers use, and attach a monitor to each so its status updates from real checks.
- Question
How do I embed a status widget on my website?
Most status page tools offer a badge or widget that shows current status and updates itself. You paste a snippet or an iframe into your site or docs. Sentivel has a status badge for each component and a live widget that matches your page's theme.
- Guide
What is a status page? A guide for 2026
What a status page is, what goes on one, whether to make it public, and how to set one up.
- Guide
What is uptime monitoring? A guide for 2026
What uptime monitoring checks, how HTTP, keyword, heartbeat and TCP checks differ, and how to stop one-off failures from paging people.
- Guide
How to monitor third-party dependencies in 2026
Which providers to watch, how to link each one to the part of your product it affects, and what to post on your status page when one of them has an incident.
- Guide
Incident communication best practices in 2026
What to say during an outage, how often to say it, and update templates for each stage of an incident.
- Guide
On-call schedules and escalation policies explained (2026)
How on-call rotations, escalation policies and acknowledgement fit together so the right person is reached when something breaks.
- Guide
How to write an incident postmortem in 2026 (with template)
The sections of an incident postmortem, what blameless means in practice, and a template you can copy.
- Question
How do I monitor a cron job?
Use a heartbeat monitor (sometimes called a dead man's switch). The job requests a unique URL each time it finishes. If no request arrives within the expected window, the monitor marks the job down and alerts you. This suits cron jobs, workers and backups, which have no public URL for an outside check to call.
- Question
What does 99.9% uptime mean (and what is a good SLA)?
99.9% uptime (three nines) allows about 8 hours 46 minutes of downtime a year, or about 43 minutes a month. Each extra nine divides that by ten. Many SaaS products commit to 99.9%. Infrastructure that other services build on often targets 99.95% or higher.
- Question
How often should uptime checks run?
Every one to two minutes is common and a sensible default. Shorter intervals catch an outage sooner and cost more. Longer ones are cheaper and leave a bigger gap before you find out. Whatever the interval, require a few failures in a row before alerting, so one failed check doesn't page anyone.
- Question
What is the difference between a status page and uptime monitoring?
Uptime monitoring detects problems: scheduled checks that tell you a service is failing. A status page tells customers: it shows current health and incident updates. Connect the two and the page updates from real checks, so nobody has to change it by hand during an outage.
- Question
How do I tell customers a third-party outage is affecting me?
Post an advisory that names the provider as the cause and says what is affected. For example: "We're aware of an issue with Stripe, a service we rely on for payments. Some checkouts may fail until it's resolved." Say when you'll update next, and don't promise anything you can't check, such as "no data was affected".
- Question
What is an escalation policy?
An escalation policy is the list of steps an alert goes through until someone acknowledges it. A typical one pages the on-call person, waits, pages them again or pages a backup, then pages a wider group or a manager. Each step has a timeout. Acknowledging the alert stops the escalation.
- Question
What is the difference between HTTP and heartbeat monitoring?
An HTTP monitor requests a URL on a schedule and checks the status code, response time and, optionally, a keyword. A heartbeat monitor waits for your job to request its URL on every run, and alerts when an expected request doesn't arrive. Use HTTP for anything with a public URL and heartbeats for cron jobs and workers.
- Question
Should my status page be public or private?
Customer-facing products usually make it public. Anyone can check it, and the incident history is visible. A private page, behind a password or login, suits internal tools and products that haven't launched. You can start private and make it public later.