Downtime is inevitable but what sets successful businesses apart is how they handle it. A key part of incident management is incident communication with both internal and external stakeholders. A status page is a crucial tool for maintaining clear communication with users during outages or service interruptions. There are numerous status page providers available with different features. This article will guide you through best practices for selecting a provider that suits your needs.

Staying on top of your third-party Cloud and SaaS service outages is crucial to maintain the reliability of your own applications. Like many modern teams, Slack might be your communication tool of choice. You can keep up with such incidents by pushing these events to a Slack channel. There are different ways of pushing incident events to Slack. In this article we will explore how to integrate IncidentHub incident lifecycle events using an incoming webhook.

Incident updates on the public status pages of your cloud providers are often the first indication that they might have an outage. Providers also post updates about upcoming and ongoing maintenance on their status pages. Thus, monitoring your cloud status pages becomes crucial to your business operations. This article will guide you through the process of effectively monitoring such status pages.

Staying on top of your third-party Cloud and SaaS service outages is crucial to maintain the reliability of your own applications. If Discord is your communication tool of choice, you can keep up with such incidents by pushing these events to a Discord channel. Discord webhooks allow external applications to send messages to specific channels within a Discord server. This article describes how to integrate Discord as a channel in your IncidentHub account using webhooks.

Modern businesses depend heavily on Software as a Service (SaaS). Almost all aspects of business operations - accounting, HR, payroll, marketing, IT, sales, support - depend on one or more SaaS applications. SaaS is not limited to being used by software development teams. Given this dependency on SaaS applications, their uptime becomes tightly tied to a business's uptime. Any SaaS downtime can affect both a business's daily operations as well as the user experience.

A recent question in an SRE forum triggered this train of thought. I've paraphrased the question to reflect its essence. There is plenty to unravel here. My first reaction to this question was that the SRE who posted this is in a difficult place with systemic issues.

A few weeks ago we released a feature on IncidentHub which gives you a historical view of your monitored services' availability.

Chances are, most of your third-party cloud and SaaS dependencies are globally distributed and have many regions of operation. Chances are, your applications use a subset of a cloud or SaaS service. If you are monitoring such a service, why should you receive alerts for all regions or every single component in the service? E.g. if you use Digital Ocean, you might be using Kubernetes in their US locations (NYC and SFO). You would want to know only when there is an outage in one of these locations.

PagerDuty's Events API V2 lets you push events from your monitoring systems to PagerDuty. You can push such events when there is a triggered, updated, or resolved incident.

Why should you monitor your third-party Cloud and SaaS vendors if you are in SRE/Ops? As part of an SRE team, your primary responsibility is ensuring the reliability of your applications. What makes you responsible for monitoring services that you don't even manage? Third-party services are just like yours - with SLAs. And outages happen, affecting you as well as many others who depend on them.