WatchMouse Public Status Pages: your own public website health page in two clicks!
17
Aug 2009

Today we move the WatchMouse Public Status Pages (WMPSP) out of beta, making them available for all WatchMouse customers free of charge!

What is a Public Status Page?

A public status page is a web page that informs your customers on the status of your services, inspired by similar pages from many organisations like Amazon, Apple, Google, but also ISPs, financial institutions and other organisation who deliver critical services to other companies or the general public. Well-known examples are:

On our Public Status Pages the current status of your selection of on-line services can be displayed, and updates (public announcements) can be placed there for your customers. The pages are hosted on the Amazon cloud infrastructure, ensuring that your status page is highly scalable. It also ensures that your status pages continue to be available even if your main site or service is not.

Should my organization have a Public Status Page?

There is a strong trend to inform customers as soon as possible when certain services become unavailable, and announce maintenance well in advance. If you would like to provide your customers a dedicated status page for the on-line services you provide to them, WMPSP is a very efficient and cost-effective solution for your organisation. You can have a Public Status Page set up in minutes by creating one or more rules in your WatchMouse account, set up a public folder, and move these rules into this folder. Using the WMPSP setting page you can post announcements, annotate current issues, and optionally set up a special host name (CNAME) so people can access the status page using your domain name, e.g. status.yourdomain.com.

How does it work?

After you have set up a public folder with monitoring rules in your account, the status of these rules will be pushed to http://status.watchmouse.com/NNN automatically (where NNN is a unique id for your status page). Make sure the settings of the rules, and especially the timers for the performance thresholds are according to your standards / SLA. You may want to have a similar set of rules with more strict thresholds for internal use so you will get notified well before your Public Status Page is update. Note that you can have your own host name as well, i.e.status.yourdomain.com instead of http://status.watchmouse.com/NNN

Whenever there is a performance or availability issue, you can annotate this in your WatchMouse account and this information (e.g. "our technicians are working on a solution, expected to be available at 16:00") will be pushed to the WMPSP as well. Similarly, you can announce maintenance or downtime in the same procedure and this will be listed in the announcement section of your Public Status Page.

All Public Status Page are hosted on the Amazon web services infrastructure, making it independent from your own servers availability and ensuring a very high availability and scalability.

Get started now!

  • Login into your account and go to the standard rule settings page
  • Create a new rule folder for each WMPSP you would like to set up, and create rules within those folder that are representative for the availability of your main services.
  • Go to the WMPSP setting page and click the [add] button, and select a folder you created in the previous step.
  • Optionally you can also add a host name within your own domain in the CNAME field. Not that you have to add a CNAME record to you DNS for this host name pointing to status.watchmouse.com.
  • Click [make public] and you're done! Note that it might take a minute or two before the status page is actually available, since the data has to be transferred to the Amazon AWS platform first.
  • Test your WMPSP by clicking on the Name and/or CNAME links in the public folder listing. Observe that each rule has it's own detail page which looks like this: WMPSP for the WatchMouse web site
  • Note that the name and logo shown can be changed in your account details
  • Next you can add announcements to your WMPSP in case you have scheduled maintenance for one of more services or when actual issues arise and you would like to update your customers about the progress fixing it.
« back