How to design a status page that actually helps during an outage.
Most status pages are useless during the incidents they're supposed to communicate. Here's how to design one that actually reduces customer support load when things go wrong.
Alex Turner
Head of Product
The status page paradox
Most engineering teams build a status page and then hope nobody ever has to look at it. That's understandable — nobody wants outages — but it leads to status pages that are badly designed for the one moment that matters most: when something is actually broken.
Here's what a genuinely helpful status page looks like, and how to build one with Sola.
Show real data, not manual updates
The single biggest problem with most status pages is that they're manually updated. During an outage, the last thing your on-call engineer wants to do is log into a dashboard and type a status update. So they don't, and your status page says "All Systems Operational" while half your users can't access your product.
Sola's status pages update automatically based on your monitor data. When a check starts failing from multiple regions, the affected component flips to "Degraded" or "Major Outage" without anyone touching a keyboard. Your customers see the truth in real time.
Group components by what users care about
Your internal architecture probably has 40+ microservices. Your customers don't care about most of them. A good status page groups components by user-facing feature: "Login", "Payments", "API", "Dashboard" — not "auth-service-v2" and "payment-webhook-processor".
In Sola, you can map any number of monitors to a single status page component. If your login feature depends on three internal services, any of them failing will flip the Login component to degraded.
Incident history builds trust
A status page with no incident history looks suspicious. Customers wonder: does this thing ever get updated? Showing a history of past incidents — including how long they lasted and how they were resolved — signals that your team takes reliability seriously and communicates honestly when things go wrong.
Sola automatically archives resolved incidents and makes them browsable on your status page.
Subscribe and notify
Make it easy for customers to subscribe to status updates via email or RSS. When an incident starts, Sola can automatically notify subscribers so your support team isn't flooded with "is your site down?" tickets. This single feature typically reduces inbound support volume by 30-50% during incidents.
