status page
Any page — public or private — that surfaces the live state of a system. The public variant is the one customers see.
A status page is the umbrella term for any interface — public or internal — that shows the current operational state of a service. Internal status pages are used by on-call engineers and SREs to triage. Public status pages are used by customers and support teams to answer the “is it down?” question.
The distinguishing feature of a status page (as opposed to a generic dashboard) is the focus on user-facing outcomes: rather than CPU, memory, and request rate, a status page surfaces “Checkout: degraded” or “API: operational”. The page is intentionally lossy — it converts dozens of underlying signals into a small number of human-readable states.
public status page
A customer-facing page that shows the live availability of a service, plus the history of past incidents.
uptime monitoring
Periodically probing a URL or endpoint from an external location to detect outages and degraded performance.
incident
A discrete event during which a service was unavailable or degraded, with a defined start, updates, and resolution.