

New GitHub Status Site - remi
https://github.com/blog/1240-new-status-site

======
rdl
Looks like they were smart and are using Rackspace for the main github and AWS
for the status site. That's 101 for status sites.

I slightly wonder if it's worth putting status sites in a separate domain as
well, for resilience against DNS outages or misconfiguration. Obviously you'd
also want status.example.com for example.com too, but having some standard way
for services to report uptime (to users and to machines, including deep API
information, not just "can I ping it" would be nice.

It would be nice if someone set up "arbitraryservicedowntime.net" and did
things like github.com.arbitraryservicedowntime.net". But then you'd need some
way to associate and promote the independent URLs. Just doing github.com and
github.net might work, if github.net is otherwise unused.

Pingdom kind of solves this for just ping, but doesn't work for deep status,
causes, ETTR, etc.

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spuz
I'm a bit clueless about network resilience, but doesn't using the url
status.github.com imply the status and main website share a DNS service? We
have seen name resolution problems in the past so would a DNS problem that
affected github.com would also affect status.github.com?

~~~
moe
_doesn't using the url status.github.com imply the status and main website
share a DNS service?_

No, but in this case they do.

 _would a DNS problem that affected github.com also affect status.github.com?_

Yes, but DNS is very easy to harden against outages, it's redundant by design.

Also Github seems to rent their nameservers from dyn.com who have a pretty
good track record of not screwing up.

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rlt3
I liked the "Battle Station Fully Operational" before.

~~~
ianstormtaylor
Yeah I miss the changing Octocat.

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kylemaxwell
They link to <https://status.github.com> which doesn't work (you have to go to
<http://status.github.com>). Bit of egg on their face, sadly.

~~~
dewski
The blog post has been updated to go to <http://status.github.com>, my
apologies about that.

~~~
remi
Do you know if there are plans to make it available on
<https://status.github.com> as well?

~~~
nanodeath
Yeah, I have the HTTPS Everywhere Chrome extension, which (almost) always
works but breaks here. Made it look like the status page was down.

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zende
There's two posts on status pages on the HN homepage right now. This and
Balanced:

\- <http://blog.balancedpayments.com/status-page/>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877643>

The hardest problems to me are properly monitoring and computing downtime.
Heroku's uptime calculation uses time[1], which breaks down for an API where
it should be more about the number of requests.

Any idea how Github is measuring downtime? Is there a difference in Github's
measurement for when there's low usage vs. going down during peak hours? How
are sporadic errors computed vs. a complete outage?

[1] [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-
status#uptime-c...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-
status#uptime-calculation)

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janerik
Right now I get an "The server refused the connection.". Not good.

[edit] ok, use http, not https...

~~~
wfarr
The status site now handles both HTTP and HTTPS gracefully.

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100k
I miss the whimsical nature of the previous status page (it seemed to fit with
GitHub's "voice" better). But I'm guessing this version isn't going to crash
when GitHub does (<https://github.com/blog/1261-github-availability-this-
week>). Hopefully it's statically generated.

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eps
Do you have negative letter-spacing on large counters? "662ms" under "98th
perc. web response time" has virtually no spacing between the glyphs. Looks
messed up, border-line illegible. That's on Mobile Safari.

Looks great overall though. Nice job, guys.

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ruswick
The visual design and choice of typeface are both excellent.

Great job.

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tzaman
I love the board's minimalistic approach - excellent job!

