StatusDashboard is a powerful communications platform that allows companies of all sizes to easily communicate system status to their customers, wherever they are. Within our documentation, you'll find everything you need to get up and running on StatusDashboard.
If you are a new user, we've put together some helpful information and links below that will quickly get you started configuring and using StatusDashboard.
URLs
Each status dashboard that you create within your account receives a unique and configurable subdomain URL for hosting your status dashboard (e.g. acme.statusdashboard.com). As soon as any status dashboard is created, this URL is live and you are free to provide it to your users and customers for access to the status dashboard. You can also change the dashboard URL at any time. You also have the option of setting up a domain alias for a status dashboard from which to host the status dashboard. This is a custom URL in your DNS zone (e.g. status.acme.com).
Services
Services are the components that you want to display and report on with your status dashboard - they can be be websites, APIs, servers, or anything else about which your users and customers require timely status information. One of the first things you'll want to do when setting up your StatusDashboard account is add some services. Services are global within your account, and once created, may be imported into one or most of your status dashboards. Once you add services, they'll immediately be available for adding to any of the status dashboards within your account.
Events
Events are one of the foundational features of StatusDashboard. You create events in StatusDashboard whenever any of the services within your StatusDashboard account experience a degradation of service, whether planned (incident) or unplanned (scheduled maintenance). When events are created, any status dashboard within your account that contains an impacted service is automatically updated and you also have the option of broadcasting notifications (like email and SMS) to any of your users who have opted in to receive them. Events have a standard lifecycle which helps to keep your users informed about their status (e.g. investigating => identified => monitoring => resolved). To get started with creating and managing events effectively, make sure you read our best practices guide to managing events.
Uptime Reports
Many service providers have SLA commitments with their customers that require their systems to maintain a certain amount of uptime during a given month or year. When you use StatusDashboard to track all incidents and scheduled maintenance activities, we become the system of record for your official uptime metrics. Utilizing our reporting tools, you can quickly and easily create uptime reports across any time period to calculate system uptime. Uptime reports also allow you to quickly determine which events impacted system uptime.
Security
We have a number of security options available to help you secure both the StatusDashboard administration portal and your dashboard pages. By default, a status dashboard subdomain is served securely over SSL and if you choose to setup a domain alias, we can also serve that over SSL. You can also log all activity within the administration portal, create a dashboard IP whitelist, an administration portal IP whitelist or an email domain whitelist. Additionally, if you would like to integrate your Identity Provider (IdP) with StatusDashboard for administrative or status dashboard authentication, we have a full suite of SSO configuration options.
Digital Signs
Digital signs are meant to display status information for one or more services on a large digital signage display (e.g. a large wall mounted television in a lobby or network operations control center). Digital signs are best run in a browser that is operating in full screen or kiosk mode and are run completely unattended (they will automatically refresh and update as status information changes). Multiple digital signs may be created containing different services and customization settings to accommodate each customer's unique needs.
Status Dashboard Options
There are many status dashboard configuration options that allow you to modify how the status dashboard looks and what information it displays. For example, you can add different content modules to the home page to provide detailed information on upcoming scheduled maintenance activities or active incidents. You can also group services using criteria that you define or change the main dashboard display between standard and compact displays.
Status Dashboard Design
It is important for most customers to have a status dashboard that matches the look and feel of their organization and its existing web properties. We provide you with tools that allow you full control over the look and feel of your dashboard. Add a custom logo, create a custom HTML header and footer, or even inject your own CSS and JavaScript into the page.
System Messages
Create a system message to inform your users about the purpose of your status dashboard and to set their expectations about how and when you will update it. The system message is shown directly above your status dashboard and is a great way to communicate important messages to your users and customers.
Notifications
Whenever events impact any of the services on your dashboard, you have the option of broadcasting notifications to your users and customers with information about the event. Customers are able to manage their own subscription preferences so they only receive the notifications relevant to them, via the channels they desire. StatusDashboard supports many different notification channels including API, Email, Google Chat, Slack, SMS, Teams (O365), Twitter and Custom Webhooks.
User Accounts
Depending on the StatusDashboard plan that you subscribe to, we provide you with one or more administrative user accounts with which to manage your status dashboard. You have the ability to add and manage user accounts, including granular user permissions for StatusDashboard administrators. We also have options to integrate user authentication with your identity provider (SSO).
Account Activation
If you choose to convert your account to one of our paid plans, we have several different options to choose from. If you require a custom configuration that is not available on one of our existing plans, please contact us - we are able to easily create a custom feature and pricing plan that suits your organization. We also have several different payment options available including credit card, invoice/purchase order and wire transfer/direct deposit.