If you've ever looked at status.osk.sh before, you might have noticed it's not very good. That changes today! I've rewritten it from the ground up, as a proper site as opposed to a hacky PHP script. Go and check it out!

This has been in the works for quite a while! I originally started working on it last year, around late August, but simply didn't manage to get it off the ground. A recent multi-hour outage that should've been totally preventable (...I was asleep, I just had to restart MongoDB) spurred me on to get back to work on it, to solve the problems that led up to it.

I've always hated the way the modern status page works, and this is also represented in my previous status page. Modern status pages (Discord's status page is a prime example) aren't actually status pages, they're PR tools. In fact, Atlassian Statuspage (the most popular status page software, the one Discord also uses) expressly tells people not to automate their statuspage. Atlassian themselves say they're "big believers in maintaining a human touch with incident communication". However, that undermines the main purpose of a statuspage, to answer the question: Is the site broken?

The previous statuspage did just the bare minimum to answer that question, the one I deem most important. Quite literally, it just showed "ONLINE" or "OUTAGE". All automated. And with that, it's already better than whatever Statuspage is doing. In the new statuspage, I highly increased the amount of information, as there's a lot of nuance that a single boolean can't show. For example, I show the amount of players online, so if suddenly an entire continent has problems connecting, it'll be visible even if the statuspage server can still reach the game.

However, there's one more followup question that users tend to have if something ends up being broken: how long will this last? The new statuspage lets me write incident reports, so as soon as I notice something's up, I can write a reason why, and give insight on how long I expect things to take. To add credibility to those insights, you will be able to see all past incidents. That way, instead of creating trust by lying to customers with a blog disguised as a status page, I hope to create trust by showing the real situation, and explaining it where needed.

In addition, I added the ability to schedule maintenance on it. That way, if longer maintenance is coming, you'll be prepared. Of course, I'll still also post notifications about such maintenance on Twitter and Discord.

Of course, these aren't "new" concepts, but it seems like the concept of an honest statuspage that shows real data as opposed to a glorified blog has fallen out of style. I hope you won't need to look at it often, but if you ever do, I hope you'll appreciate the attempt at creating a realistic, honest statuspage!