Blog
Practical, honest writing on running a reliable service: guides, product comparisons, and straight answers to common questions about status pages, uptime monitoring, incidents, on-call, and the providers you depend on.
- Guide
How to Migrate From Atlassian Statuspage in 2026
Move your components, incident history, and email subscribers from Atlassian Statuspage (or Instatus) to Sentivel in a few minutes with the built-in importer, then finish the switch with monitors and your custom domain.
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How to Create a Status Page in 2026
A step-by-step guide to creating a status page: what to put on it, how to back it with monitoring, and how to publish it on your own domain in minutes.
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Status Page Examples for Every Use Case (2026)
A tour of great status pages by industry, what each one gets right, and how to build the same thing in Sentivel.
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Status Page Best Practices in 2026
The practices that separate a status page customers trust from one they ignore, and how Sentivel builds each of them in by default.
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10 Best Status Page Tools in 2026
An honest comparison of the leading status page tools in 2026, by category and use case, including which have built-in monitoring, on-call and third-party dependency tracking. Written by Sentivel, with Sentivel included on the same terms.
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6 Best Atlassian Statuspage Alternatives in 2026
The best Atlassian Statuspage alternatives in 2026, grouped by use case, including which add built-in monitoring, on-call, and third-party dependency tracking. Written by Sentivel, included on the same terms.
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6 Best Better Stack Alternatives in 2026
The best Better Stack alternatives in 2026, grouped by why teams switch, including simpler pricing, status page focus, and native third-party dependency tracking. Written by Sentivel, included on the same terms.
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5 Best Instatus Alternatives in 2026
The best Instatus alternatives in 2026, grouped by why teams switch, including deeper monitoring, on-call, and native third-party dependency advisories. Written by Sentivel, included on the same terms.
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6 Best UptimeRobot Alternatives in 2026
The best UptimeRobot alternatives in 2026, grouped by why teams switch, including a better status page, real on-call, and third-party dependency advisories. Written by Sentivel, included on the same terms.
Read → - Question
How much does a status page cost?
It ranges from free to hundreds of dollars a month. Open-source, self-hosted options are free but you run them yourself. Hosted tools start free or a few dollars a month for a small page and rise with subscribers, seats, and monitors. Sentivel is free to start, including built-in monitoring, with a custom domain and the fuller feature set as you grow.
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How do I monitor an API?
Point an HTTP monitor at a health endpoint and check it every one to two minutes. Judge the response by status code, response time, and optionally a keyword in the body, so a 200 that returns an error page is still caught. Pair it with a confirmation threshold so a single failed check never pages anyone.
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How do I monitor SSL certificate expiry?
Use a monitor that checks the certificate on your domain and warns you a set number of days before it expires, commonly 14 to 30. An expired certificate takes a site down for everyone with a browser warning, and it is entirely avoidable with an early heads-up. Sentivel checks certificate validity as part of monitoring an HTTPS endpoint.
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What is keyword monitoring?
Keyword monitoring checks that a specific word or phrase is present (or absent) in a page's response, on top of the status code. It catches the failure where a page returns 200 but shows an error, a login wall, or a maintenance message. You set a keyword that should always appear on a healthy page, and the check fails if it goes missing.
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How do I calculate uptime percentage?
Uptime percentage is uptime divided by total time, times 100. Over a 30-day month (43,200 minutes), 43 minutes of downtime is about 99.9%. The detail that matters is what you count as down: which components, and whether planned maintenance is excluded. Be consistent and state your method, because an inconsistent number is worse than a modest honest one.
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What is an on-call rotation?
An on-call rotation shares responsibility for responding to alerts across a team by taking turns, so one person is not on the hook every night. A schedule defines who is on call at any moment, hands off on a set cadence (often weekly), and supports one-off overrides for swaps and time off. Alerts route to whoever is on call at that moment.
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How do I reduce alert fatigue?
Alert only on things a human must act on, and make each alert trustworthy. Use confirmation thresholds so a single failed check never pages, multi-region checks so one network blip does not open an incident, and severity routing so low-priority issues do not wake anyone. Every false page teaches the team to ignore the next one, so the fix is fewer, better alerts, not more.
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What is a blameless postmortem?
A blameless postmortem examines an incident by focusing on the systems and conditions that let it happen, not on who to blame. The goal is honest learning: people share what they saw and did without fear, so the real contributing factors surface and get fixed. It assumes everyone acted reasonably given what they knew at the time.
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What is MTTR (mean time to resolution)?
MTTR is the average time from when an incident starts to when it is resolved, across a set of incidents. It is a common reliability metric because it measures how quickly you recover, which customers feel directly. Related measures include mean time to detect (how fast you notice) and mean time to acknowledge (how fast someone responds).
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What should I write in an incident update?
Lead with impact: what is affected and who feels it. Then say what you know about the cause (or that you are investigating), what you are doing, and when the next update will come. Keep it plain and short, avoid jargon and unverifiable promises, and always post a clear resolution update at the end. Sentivel can draft each update for you, review-first, in this shape.
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What is a component on a status page?
A component is one part of your product shown on the status page with its own status, such as API, dashboard, or payments. Components let a page point at exactly what is affected instead of a single indicator for the whole service. Name them the way customers think about your product, and back each with a monitor so its status stays accurate on its own.
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How do I embed a status widget on my website?
Most status page tools give you a small badge or an embeddable widget that shows current status and updates itself. You drop a snippet or an iframe into your site or docs, and it stays in sync with the page. Sentivel provides a per-component status badge and a themed live widget you can embed, so people see status without leaving your product.
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What Is a Status Page? Complete Guide for 2026
A status page is the public page where you tell customers how your service is doing. Here is what goes on one, when to make it public, and how to set one up in minutes.
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What Is Uptime Monitoring? Complete Guide for 2026
What uptime monitoring actually checks, the difference between HTTP, keyword, heartbeat and TCP checks, and how to avoid the false-positive alerts that train people to ignore the pager.
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How to Monitor Third-Party Dependencies in 2026
When a provider you rely on goes down, your customers feel it as your outage. Here is how to monitor your third-party dependencies and post a clear, honest heads-up on your status page.
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Incident Communication Best Practices in 2026
What to say during an outage, how often to say it, and templates for each stage of an incident. Clear, honest updates cost you far less trust than the outage itself.
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On-Call Schedules and Escalation Policies Explained (2026)
How on-call rotations, escalation ladders and acknowledgements fit together, so the right person is reached when something breaks, without burning out the team.
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How to Write an Incident Postmortem in 2026 (With Template)
A postmortem turns an outage into something your team learns from instead of repeats. Here is the structure, why blameless matters, and a template you can copy.
Read → - Question
How do I monitor a cron job?
Use a heartbeat (also called a dead-man's switch). Instead of something reaching out to your job, the job pings a unique URL each time it finishes successfully. If a ping does not arrive within the window you expect, the monitor marks it down and alerts you. That is the right tool for cron jobs, workers and backups, which have no public URL for an outside check to hit.
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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 per year, or roughly 43 minutes per month. Each extra nine cuts that by about ten times. What counts as good depends on what you are running: 99.9% is a common baseline for most SaaS, while infrastructure people depend on heavily often targets 99.95% or higher.
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How often should uptime checks run?
Every one to two minutes is the common choice and a good default. More frequent checks detect an outage sooner but add load and cost; less frequent checks save resources but widen the window before you know. Whatever interval you pick, pair it with a confirmation threshold so a single failed check never pages anyone.
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What is the difference between a status page and uptime monitoring?
Uptime monitoring is how you detect a problem: scheduled checks that tell you when a service is failing. A status page is how you communicate it: the public page where customers see current health and incident updates. They work best together, where the monitoring drives the status shown on the page so it stays honest without anyone toggling it by hand.
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How do I tell customers a third-party outage is affecting me?
Map the affected part of your product to the provider it depends on, then post an advisory that attributes the cause to the provider and scopes the impact, for example: we are aware of an issue with a provider we rely on for payments; some checkouts may be affected until it resolves. Name the dependency, say what is affected, promise an update, and avoid unverifiable promises.
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What is an escalation policy?
An escalation policy is the ordered ladder an alert climbs until someone acknowledges it: page the on-call person, wait, then page them again or page a secondary, then widen to a group or a manager. Each step has a timeout, so a missed alert is backstopped automatically instead of an incident going unanswered. Acknowledging stops the ladder from climbing further.
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What is the difference between HTTP and heartbeat monitoring?
HTTP monitoring reaches out: it requests a URL on a schedule and judges the response by status code, timing and optionally a keyword. Heartbeat monitoring is the inverse: your job pings the monitor on each run, and the absence of an expected ping is the signal that something is wrong. Use HTTP for anything with a public URL, and heartbeats for cron jobs and workers that have none.
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Should my status page be public or private?
Public is the norm for customer-facing products: it answers the are-you-down question for everyone and builds trust with a visible track record. A private page (password or login gated) suits internal tools or pre-launch products that are not ready to publish uptime. You can start private and switch to public later.
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