Forem: Jose Andrés Peredo

DNS Incidents Like Cloudflare’s Could Turn your Status Page Useless, Here is How to Prevent It

Jose Andrés Peredo — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 05:27:50 +0000

How do I prevent DNS related Issues from affecting my status page? The question is a common one that we receive from customers at Statuspal.

We have created this article to answer the question and provide clear reasons.

TL;DR

Use a separate domain for your status page. Instead of status.yourcompany.com, use yourcompany-status.com.

Use two different DNS nameservers, one for your status page and another for your main infrastructure. For example, if you use Cloudfront for your primary servers, use something else for your yourcompany-status.com.

You could go as far as using a completely different Domain registrar.

What is DNS

According to Cloudflare, The Domain Name System (DNS) is the Internet’s phonebook. People access information online via domain names like nytimes.com and espn.com. Web browsers interact through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources.

Types of DNS issues

There are three types of DNS issues that can affect the components of the Domain Name System. Below are some examples that we’ve seen in the past:

Outage affecting your DNS provider

An outage affecting your DNS provider (nameservers), like the one that affected Cloudflare yesterday Jun 21, 2022, brought down a significant portion of the internet.

This outage type can cause slow response times or complete unreachability of your services.

Outage affecting your Domain registrar

An outage affecting your Domain registrar could then impact your domain name and render your services unreachable or unresponsive. The results are similar to the previous DNS issue.

Incorrect DNS records

Finally, the third issue can result from a misconfigured DNS record. The problem can impact your status page. This logical error would happen at your company/team level instead of upstream.

How to Prevent DNS issues from affecting your status sage

Now that we’ve identified the types of DNS issues that can affect your status page, how can we prevent them?

1. Use a separate domain a for your status page

It’s common for companies to use a vanity subdomain like status.apple.com; it looks great, legitimate and maintains branding. However, in this case, it can be to the detriment of the resilience of your status page.

Instead, opt for using a completely different domain name, like apple-status.com, not status.apple.com. This fix prevents some common issues like incorrect DNS records. Since the DNS management is separate, the chances of adding the wrong record are significantly reduced.

2. Use a different DNS nameserver for your status page

Using a different DNS provider is critical in preventing your status page from being affected by the same DNS incidents that can affect your main servers.

For example, DigitalOcean’s status page and admin dashboard were inaccessible yesterday during Cloudflare’s outage. Unfortunately, users could not get information about this incident from the status page during this crucial time.

So if, for example, you use Fastly for your main infrastructure, use something different for your status page domain. Recommendation #1 is a prerequisite for this.

3. Use a different domain registrar for your status page

Finally, although uncommon, an outage affecting your name registrar can render your services unreachable. In this case, using a separate registrar for your status page makes sense. Doing so reduces the chance that an outage could affect both simultaneously.

For example, if you registered yourcompany.com with Namecheap, use Amazon Route 53 for your status page domain (yourcompany-status.com).

Status pages following these recommendations

Following these good practices is becoming common practice as companies learn from unexpected problems. Here are some examples of status pages implementing at least some of our recommendations:

Meta status page (https://metastatus.com/)
Twitter status page (https://api.twitterstat.us/)
Intercom status page (https://www.intercomstatus.com/)
Cloudfalre status page (https://www.cloudflarestatus.com)

All of the above status pages have a custom top-level domain, and none of them depends on the same domain as their servers.

Conclusion

DNS related issues are not the most common type of incident, but they are a real threat. If you are looking to have a highly available status page, you want to prevent these types of issues. Follow our advice and prevent your status page from becoming useless when you need it the most.

6 Top-Rated Open Source Status Page Alternatives for 2022

Jose Andrés Peredo — Tue, 17 May 2022 14:26:21 +0000

With so much reliance on online services and applications these days, a status page is essential to a business, its support and IT teams. It’s a key component in your incident communication strategy.

Communicating the status of your website or service to users (particularly customers) creates trust and keeps them updated—especially during downtimes. Plus, it saves you from sending out emails or using other time-consuming methods to provide status updates.

There are two ways to go around setting up your own status page, using a SAAS solution or self-hosting your status page. Now you might be wondering, what are the advantages and disadvantages of self-hosted vs hosted status pages? We go into detail about this in our blog post Hosted vs self-hosted for your Status Page, Which is best?.

However, in this blog post we want to provide you with some great open source alternatives for self-hosted status pages, ranked from good to the best.

Best 6 Open Source Status Pages 2022

To summarize, a status page should be able to provide a clear picture of the current and past status of your application or service, ideally with monitoring and incident automation and history. The following open source alternatives cover these key features:

Monitoror
Statping
Vigil
Upptime
CState
Cachet

1. Monitoror

If you’re looking for a minimalistic and cool-looking status dashboard that automatically monitors the status of your services, then Monitoror is just for you.

Monitoror installs as a single installer file on your Mac, Windows or Linux and is literally ready to go. However, if you require incident reporting and history you might want to look into our next candidates.

Features of Monitoror

Monitoring
Geeky design
Single file running on Windows, Mac, Linux

2. Statping

Statping also has powerful monitoring capabilities, and allows you to display beautiful metrics from your services.

Reporting your own incidents is also possible, but only via Statpin's own API. Nevertheless, with a little familiarization, this should be possible without any problems.

Statping is a bit more complex to set up and you need your own server to get the service running. However, it is also multi-platform so you can deploy it in any operating system.

Features of Statping

Cool UI
Mobile app
Runs on any server
Custom SASS styling
Notification via different services

3. Vigil

A somewhat simpler service is Vigil. The program can do everything that a status page should be able to do - incident creation, monitoring and notification via plenty of channels (e.g. Email, SMS, Slack, Telegram).

Vigil is another service that requires self-hosting. An interesting fact is that Vigil is writing in Rust, so you’ll need either cargo or OPTopt to use the dockerized version.

A great advantage of Vigil is that it can be used internally on a company lan network. For a small company certainly a good and free service for internal use.

Features of Vigil

Generates status page
Notifications (Email, SMS, Slack, Telegram, and many more)
Vigil local can be internally used (e.g. LAN)

4. Upptime

Upptime is one of our absolute favorites. The service is completely open source and very user-friendly. You don't need your own server since the status page is hosted directly via Github Services.

For a free status page, Upptime can do a lot: Incident creation, monitoring service, display of active and past incidents, live status and scheduled maintenances.

If one of your systems should crash, you can set up notifications via different external providers.

Best of all, Upptime creates an automatic Github issue for incidents and also closes it again as soon as the incident is resolved. This way, the developer team can always keep an eye on your services.

Features of Upptime

Opens and closes a github issue automatically(good for dev team)
Commits for response time
No server required, powered entirely by github
Active incidents, scheduled maintenance, live status, past incidents
Notifications to different services
Handy UI

5. CState

CState is another minimalist option, interestingly based on Hugo (static site generator). Thanks to that, it can be easily hosted via various providers such as Github or Netlify and runs extremely fast due to the static structure of the site.

CState provides all the most important features a status page should have, namely incident and maintenance reporting and history.

Individual customizations are also feasible. In addition, a built-in package with translations into eight different languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and Dutch, is included. In case of complications, a limited support helps you for a small fee- or even with the installation.

Features of CState

Hugo based
Hosted on netlify, github pages
Maintenance, incident creation
Fast, static site
Custom design possible
Comes with build in translation into 8 languages

6. Cachet

This brings us to the old hand and top dog among the free status sites: Cachet.

The first thing that stands out is that Cachet is big. The open source project has many contributors, extensive documentation and even its own Slack community, which is always happy to help with questions.

You will however need to configure and maintain a server with Cachet and is slightly less straightforward than some previously mentioned alternatives.

Other than that, the user interface is a delight and the dashboard is clearly laid out. You can create incidents, monitoring services, scheduled maintenances as well as your own metrics. Furthermore you can add subscribers and team members with different rights. Cachet provides two-factor authentication for this purpose.

The customizable status page is also particularly convenient for your users. The powerful JSON API pleasantly completes the picture.

Features of Cachet

Incident, maintenance, monitoring metrics
Subscribers & team members
Nice and easy to use dashboard
Two factor authentication
Customizable status page
Powerful JSON API
Extensive documentation

Conclusion

If you’d prefer not to have to configure and maintain a new server, and don’t mind relaying in a service like Github or Netlify, Upptime and CState are a great choice.

However if a simple monitoring service and slick status dashboard is what you’re after, Monitoror with its geeky design is probably the best option for you.

Now, if you don’t mind the extra effort of setting up and maintaining your own server, and want a more powerful alternative to the above, then you can’t go wrong with Cachet, Statping or Vigil. Especially Cachet stands out with its long history, many contributors and its excellent and comprehensive documentation.

Finally, if you find yourself outgrowing these free and open source alternatives, it might be time for you to consider a modern SaaS solution, like Statuspal, where you’ll get all of the features described above and then some, bundled with amazing and responsive support that can help you get up and running in a few minutes.