Status Monitoring Best Practices

Monitor vendor status pages you depend on

Most engineering teams manually check vendor status pages when something seems wrong. By that point, you've already lost time to diagnosis. Instead, set up a monitor on your critical vendors' status pages — your cloud provider, payment processor, email service, CDN — so your team knows about incidents before they start investigating internally.

Target the overall status indicator element on each vendor's status page. When it changes from "All Systems Operational" to an incident status, your team gets an immediate alert.

Track last-updated timestamps

A status page that stops updating is a warning sign. If a vendor's status page normally updates every few minutes during incidents but goes silent, it may indicate they've lost control of the situation or the status page itself is affected. Monitor the last-updated or last-checked timestamp element to catch silent status page failures.

Monitor your own status page

If you operate a status page for your customers, monitor it from an external perspective. Confirm it loads, displays the correct status, and updates on schedule. Internal incidents can sometimes affect the status page itself, leaving customers with no accurate information.

Incident communication monitoring

During a live incident, monitor the vendor's incident update element for new posts. Some status page platforms publish incident updates in a dedicated section. Monitoring this element means your incident response team automatically receives each vendor update rather than manually refreshing the page every few minutes.

Recommended monitoring targets