Status Pages are Awesome

The difference between good and mediocre online services is not just the features. Their are small things that great services do that add to the whole experience of using a product or service. Today I was experiencing a problem on DockerHub as I was creating automated builds of containers from github.

This was the first time I had performed this task and I was expecting my builds to kick off shortly after I created the repository on docker hub. After an hour went by I started thinking it was something I did wrong. Rather than tinkering with settings I found Docker’s status page.

It quickly told me they were having an issue with their build backlog. So I knew it was their problem not mine. The only thing that would have made this experience better was a message when I logged into cocker hub, but just having the status page probably saved me minutes or at least hours of my time.

Status pages don’t need to tell your users everything about their system. Basically we care if there are any known issues with your service at the moment or there are performance issues.

Many times it can be as simple as a listing of “Red Lights/Green Lights” and alert message at the top of the page.

The most important thing is transparency of the system status with the users. Most user’s don’t get bent out of shape if a service is down occasionally or there are issues as long as companies communicate clearly and effectively about problems that may impact them.