A status page shows customers whether your service is working and carries your updates when it isn't. These are the steps in the order that makes sense, with how each one works in Sentivel.
Step 1: List your components
Write down the parts of your product a customer would notice breaking, named the way they'd name them: API, dashboard, payments, email. Skip internal service names. Three to six components is usually enough for a small product. Each gets its own status, so an incident points at the affected part.
Step 2: Attach a monitor to each component
A page someone has to update by hand is usually out of date during the first minutes of an incident. Attach a monitor to each component instead. In Sentivel that's an HTTP monitor for anything with a URL, or a heartbeat for a cron job or worker. The component's status follows the checks. A single failed check doesn't open an incident, and a new component shows as warming up until it has a few successful checks.
Step 3: Choose a design and add your brand
Keep the layout simple so the status is the first thing people read. Add your logo, colors and links to your site and support. Sentivel has two designs, modern and classic, both with light and dark modes.
Step 4: Decide public or private
Most customer-facing products use a public page. A password-protected page suits internal tools or a product that isn't ready to publish uptime. You can switch later, and in Sentivel the change applies straight away.
Step 5: Put it on your own domain
Customers expect something like status.yourcompany.com. Sentivel gives every page a subdomain and supports your own custom domain with automatic TLS.
Step 6: Turn on subscriptions
Offer email updates and an RSS feed so customers hear about an incident without watching the page. A status badge or embedded widget in your app or docs helps people find the page before they open a ticket.
Step 7: Map the providers you depend on
This step is optional. Many outages start at a cloud host, payment provider or email service. If you map which components depend on which providers, Sentivel marks the affected component when one of those providers has an incident, posts a short notice on your page naming the provider, and removes it when the provider resolves the incident. A page with no providers mapped is a complete status page, and you can add them any time.
Step 8: Publish and keep it current
Publish the page and link to it from your site footer, help center and support replies. From then on, the work is posting an update when something breaks. Sentivel can draft each update in plain language for you to review before it goes out.