It’s an easy problem to fix as basically services should emit performance data, openly, and the status page should just summarize that. So if a service doesn’t report out, it’s assumed down or erroring out.
Having an excel file where people enter statuses is not very useful to me as a customer. That’s more like a blog.
I haven’t written a status page in a while, but the rest of my infrastructure starts freaking out if it hasn’t heard from a service in a while. Why doesn’t their status page have at least a warning about things not looking good?
In my experience public status pages are "political" and no matter how they start tend to trend towards higher management control in some way... that leads to people who don't know, aren't in the thick of it, don't understand it, and / or are cautious to the point that it stops being useful.
Not only political, but with SLAs on the line they have significant financial and legal consequences as well. Most managers are probably happier keeping the ‘incident declaring power’ in as few a hands as possible to make sure those penalty clauses aren’t ever un-necessarily triggered.
Same with most corporate twitter feeds. I’d like to follow my public transit/airport/highway authority, but it’ll be 10 posts about Kelly’s great work in accounting for every service disruption.
And No, I don’t want to install a separate app to get push notifications about service disruptions for every service I use.
