A status page is the public page where customers see whether your service is healthy and read your updates when it is not. Creating one is quick if you do it in the right order. This guide walks through it end to end, and every step maps to something you set up in Sentivel in a few minutes.
Step 1: List your components
Start with the parts of your product a customer would notice going down, named the way they think about them: API, dashboard, payments, email. Do not mirror your internal architecture. Three to six clear components is usually right for a small product. Each one gets its own status on the page, so a problem points at the right thing instead of a single green or red dot for the whole service.
Step 2: Attach a monitor to each component
A status page that someone has to toggle by hand goes stale the moment an incident starts. Instead, back each component with a monitor. In Sentivel you point an HTTP monitor at a URL, or use a heartbeat for a cron job or worker that has no public URL, and the component status follows the checks automatically. Flap thresholds mean a brief blip never opens an incident, and a brand-new component reads as warming up rather than a premature green until it has proven itself.
Step 3: Choose a design and add your brand
Keep the layout minimal so the status is the loudest thing on the page. Add your logo, your colors, and links back to your site and support. Sentivel ships two clean designs, modern and classic, and handles light and dark for you, so the page looks like part of your product without any design work.
Step 4: Decide public or private
A public page is the norm for customer-facing products and builds trust with a visible track record. A private, password-gated page suits internal tools or a product that is not ready to publish uptime yet. You can start private and flip to public later, and in Sentivel the change takes effect immediately.
Step 5: Put it on your own domain
Customers expect the page at something like status.yourcompany.com. Sentivel gives you a vanity subdomain out of the box and supports your own custom domain with automatic TLS, so the page is on your brand rather than a shared host.
Step 6: Turn on subscriptions
Not everyone will sit on the page waiting for news. Offer email updates and an RSS feed so customers hear about an issue through a channel they already use. Add a status badge or an embeddable widget to your app or docs so people can find the page before they open a ticket.
Step 7: Map the providers you depend on
This step is optional and worth it. Most outages are not your code; they are a cloud host, a payments provider, or an email service having a bad day. Map those dependencies in Sentivel and, when one has an incident, Sentivel flags the affected component and auto-posts an honest, provider-attributed message on your page, then clears it when the upstream incident resolves. You can skip this entirely and add it later; a page with zero dependencies is a complete, finished status page.
Step 8: Publish and keep it current
Publish the page and link to it from your footer, help center, and support flow. From here the only ongoing work is posting a clear update when something breaks, and Sentivel can draft that update for you in plain language, review-first, so keeping the page current is quick even when your team is busy.