Introducing Statuspage Getting Started guides! First up: What is Statuspage?

[Jake Bartlett]

Over the next several weeks we'll be sharing some of our Getting Started guides here in the community. Throughout this series of posts, we'd love to hear from customers and non-customers about how you approach communicating with users about incidents.

The first getting started guide is a quick introduction to Statuspage: Statuspage is a tool that helps you communicate with your users about incidents (outages, performance issues) and scheduled maintenance. Read the getting started guide and chime in below!

If you're a current Statuspage user, which team is responsible for updating the page? If you're not a current Statuspage user, what are you doing now to update your users about incidents?

[Nick Coates]

This looks like a great start to new guides! We actually have some internal guides at Symantec that we use including demo recordings. These are then used by our Cloud Command Center who are the team responsible for updating all 14 of our Statuspage's.

It's a story in itself really, the fact that we brought a new team together of experienced incident engineers all from our implementation of Statuspage :)

[Jake Bartlett]

@Nick Coates I love this! Thanks for chiming in.

Super curious about the structure, content, & purpose of those internal guides you mentioned. Wonder if there is additional content we could be creating so that customers don't have to create their own guides? Hmm...

[Nick Coates]

@Jake Bartlett These guides are literally step by step instructions with screenshots. They go from how to log into Statuspage (we use SAML) into actually how to post the content using the incident templates/framework. They are actually created in Confluence.

I think for us is these guides are specific to Symantec, and is how Symantec uses Statuspage. 

I wonder if there would be a way for Statuspage to provide the baseline guidance, and customers can take them and "tweak" them based on their business requirements? Perhaps this is dynamic so when its updated by Atlassian, the page is updated too ...

Perhaps there could also be a way for customers to add links to guides directly within the Management Portal?? 

[Jake Bartlett]

I wonder if there would be a way for Statuspage to provide the baseline guidance, and customers can take them and "tweak" them based on their business requirements? Perhaps this is dynamic so when its updated by Atlassian, the page is updated too ...

Certainly an interesting idea! I wonder how broadly something like this would be used though. I definitely see this being useful particularly for onboarding new users into Statuspage.

@nickcoatesukDo you find your team uses those guides on a regular basis? Or after using Statuspage a few times, do they get familiar enough to run incident comms without the guides? 

[Nick Coates]

After running through a couple of incidents, team occasionally refers back to them. But yes, these are great for on boarding new users and are widely regarded.