During IT infrastructure downtime, everyone is in the dark about what is happening: your customer success team, your stakeholders, every other team in the company and most importantly, your customers. The right incident communication flow allows the IT team to keep everyone updated.
An efficient way of communicating is through the use of status pages. However, you cannot effectively communicate with one status page because the type of information you want to pass across to these sets of people is different.
Hence, there is a need for private and public status pages. In this blog post, you will learn about private and public status pages and when and how to use them.
Understanding Public and Private Status Pages
A status page is a communication tool that the IT department of a company uses to communicate with people during downtime when the IT infrastructure is inaccessible on the front end.
When there is downtime, the whole department in the company is affected, especially when most of the sale is done online. Communicating to everyone through the same communication channel is inefficient, hence the use of private and public status pages.
To ensure your customers are seeing exactly what you expect them to see and to maintain the integrity and availability of your services, read How to Make Sure Your Page or API Always Has the Expected Response.
Public Status Pages
A public status page is used to communicate to the public the real-time health status of a company's IT infrastructure, which can be your website, app, API etc. A public status page is accessible to everyone who has the link. The information transmitted via the public status page is not sensitive and communicates the website's current status to the public.
It is advisable to have a custom domain for your public status page to make it easier to find. For example, the domain for the GitHub status page goes thus: GitHub Status, giving it visibility and making it easier to find on the internet when users are searching for it.
Apart from the fact that public status pages give real-time status updates at all times, they help reduce the number of customer queries and support ticket your customer success team has in downtime.
Private Status Pages
Private status pages are restricted to people who have the password for them; hence, access is limited. Private status pages are used to showcase sensitive information to specific company people and maintain privacy within the company. Private pages help the IT department communicate effectively with other departments and avoid being overwhelmed with update requests.
Some status pages are also connected to the team's Slack, Microsoft Teams or other communication channels for notifications and fast responses.
When and How to Use a Public Status Page (Use Cases)
A public status page has three primary use cases:
a. 24/7 Status Update: A public status page is used to publish real-time service status updates on a company's IT infrastructure. Google has indexed the page, and it is available online for all to access at all times.
b. Effective Incident Management: The importance of public status pages becomes obvious in incidents; when the IT infrastructure is inaccessible, and customers want to know what is happening.
For instance, if a downtime occurs for a retail company during a high-traffic sales events, the public status page becomes the go-to in such circumstance, calms customers' minds, and gives them updates until the incident is cleared. To explore best practices for handling outages and managing incidents effectively, visit our blog: Incident Management Best Practices.
c. Incident Logs and Transparency: The status page is where the company releases incident reports after incidents have been resolved to maintain transparency. This is to build brand trust, maintain complete transparency and reliability with customers.
An excellent example of this is the GitHub status page, as seen below: