Understanding status page components

Components are the building blocks of your status page. They represent distinct parts of your system that customers care about.

What is a component?

A component is a functional part of your service. Examples:

• Main website
• API
• Search service
• Payment processing
• Mobile app backend

See the Hacker News Status Page for a real example.

Component statuses

Status	Meaning
Operational	Everything working normally
Degraded Performance	Slower than usual but functional
Partial Outage	Some functionality affected
Major Outage	Service unavailable
Maintenance	Planned downtime

Manual vs. automatic status

Without uptime monitoring linked, you manage components manually:

1. Incident happens in your system
2. You create an incident in OnlineOrNot
3. You update the incident as you investigate
4. You resolve the incident when fixed

With uptime monitoring linked, OnlineOrNot automates this:

1. Uptime check fails
2. Incident is automatically created
3. Uptime check passes
4. Incident is automatically resolved

You can link checks from:

• OnlineOrNot
• Pingdom
• Uptime Robot

Modeling your system

Good component design makes your status page useful to customers.

Good components:

• "Website" - your main customer-facing site
• "API" - for developer customers
• "Mobile App" - if you have one

Too granular:

• "Database Primary"
• "Redis Cache Cluster"
• "Load Balancer Pool 2"

Customers don't care about your infrastructure details. They care about whether they can use your product.

Exception: B2B products where customers are technical may benefit from more detail.

Grouping components

For complex systems, group related components. This keeps your status page scannable while providing detail when needed.

See Group components for setup instructions.