Maintenance windows, incident updates and email subscribers

Open the status page under Status pages, click Manage and add a maintenance window: a title, an optional description, the start and end time, and the monitors it affects. Tick the notification option to email the page's subscribers.

While the window is in progress:

• checks keep running and are recorded, but failures do not open incidents and no alerts are sent for the affected monitors (the recovery of an outage that began before the window is still announced);
• checks taken during the window do not count against uptime, on status pages, badges, reports and the API alike;
• the status page shows the affected monitors as under maintenance.

To keep the public history honest, a window cannot start in the past (a few minutes of grace cover filling in the form), lasts at most 14 days and can be scheduled up to a year ahead. Once it has started, its start time is fixed, and once it has ended only the title and description can change. You can end a window early when the work is done.

Outages that monitoring detects appear on the status page by themselves. A posted incident adds what visitors want to know: what is affected, what you know and what you are doing. Under Manage, report an incident with a title, an impact (no impact, minor, major or critical), the affected monitors and a first update.

Each update has a status (Investigating, Identified, Monitoring or Resolved) and a message, and the page shows the whole timeline. The incident is resolved while its latest update is "Resolved"; a later update reopens it. Tick the notification option on an update to email subscribers.

A useful rhythm: a first update within minutes, even if you only know the symptoms; then an update whenever something changes, with the time of the next one; and a closing update with the cause and what will prevent a repeat.

Visitors can enter their email address on the status page. They receive a confirmation email first (the link is valid for 48 hours), and only confirmed addresses get notifications: new incidents, their updates and resolution, and scheduled maintenance with its start and end, whenever you choose to notify. Every email contains a link that unsubscribes in one click.

A status page can have up to 100 subscribers on the free plan and up to 5,000 on paid plans. The subscriber list is under Manage, where you can also remove addresses. FastPing uses these addresses only to send the page's notifications.

Every status page also publishes:

• https://fastping.app/s/<address>/feed.atom: an Atom feed of incidents and maintenance, newest first, for feed readers and chat integrations that follow feeds;
• https://fastping.app/s/<address>/feed.rss: the same entries as RSS 2.0, for readers that only take RSS;
• https://fastping.app/s/<address>/status.json: the overall status, each component, unresolved incidents and active or upcoming maintenance, for your own website or tools.

On a custom domain, the same files are at https://status.example.com/feed.atom, /feed.rss and /status.json.