Staying ahead of service outages
Third-party service outages happen all the time, here's how you can survive them
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In today's newsletter, I'll explore how entrepreneurs rely on dozens of external services and APIs to run their products and businesses.
I'll discuss the costs of third-party service outages, and how most people handle them.
Finally, I'll introduce you to StatusSight, a new product I'm working on that provides real-time monitoring for all the services you depend on.
We all depend on dozens of services
Whether you're building products, selling them, running a business, or working for a tech company, you depend on many third-party services. For example:
Infrastructure: AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, Supabase, MongoDB, GitHub, Sentry
APIs: Auth0, Stripe, Algolia, Twilio, Resend, OpenAI, Plaid, Cloudinary
Marketing and Sales: HubSpot, ConvertKit, Salesforce, Google Ads, Mailchimp, Marketo
Product: Segment, PostHog, Figma, Optimizely, Zendesk, Intercom, Hotjar
e-Commerce: WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Amazon, PayPal, Square, Quickbooks
Daily Work: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Notion, Calendly, Loom, Monday, Asana, 1Password
These services enable you to achieve more in less time, focus on your core business, and better serve customers, which is fantastic!
The harsh truth about service outages
Unfortunately, any external service you use is another potential failure point.
Almost all services encounter issues or outages at some point, even services built by giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
When that happens, it can lead to a variety of problems:
Product Disruption: Your product may experience a complete or partial outage, service degradation, bugs, or data corruption.
Customer Dissatisfaction: Customers may become frustrated and flood you with support tickets or rant publicly on social media.
Revenue Loss: The outage may prevent you from onboarding new customers or driving existing customers to switch to competitors.
Operational Downtime: Your work and collaboration with your team may be disrupted, stalling projects and reducing productivity.
Increased Costs: Dealing with outages and remediating the damage they cause can take days, costing you time and money.
The importance of learning about outages early
Most people learn about third-party service outages way too late.
Quite often, you may find that your product has an issue through angry customers. It could then take hours of debugging to discover that the issue is due to a malfunction in a third-party service.
On other occasions, you might learn about the outage from Twitter or from a coworker.
In both cases, the damage is already done at that point: customers could not make a purchase, your email campaign wasn't running, or your database was corrupted.
Status pages are great… until they aren’t
Many services offer a status page where you can see active incidents and subscribe to be notified when issues occur.
While helpful, status pages have their own set of problems:
Cumbersome Management: You have to sign up for dozens of different status pages for each service that you rely on, which is time-consuming and difficult to manage.
Inconsistent Alerts: Each status page offers different alerting methods, such as email, text messages, Slack, RSS, etc. This means tracking different alerts on different mediums.
Irrelevant Notifications: You often get bombarded with irrelevant alerts that don't apply to your specific use of the service, e.g. you probably don’t care about an outage in SendGrid webhooks if you don’t use them.
Reliance on Company: Status pages rely solely on the company that owns the service to provide updates, which means issues often surface late or don’t surface at all.
Introducing StatusSight
This is why I've decided to build StatusSight - an all-in-one status page for all the services you depend on.
It aggregates the status of various popular services, providing a single view of your entire infrastructure in one place, so you don't have to subscribe to dozens of status pages.
StatusSight currently monitors 25+ services (more coming soon) and shows their real-time status. It’s the first solution of its kind to show high-resolution minute-by-minute information:
In the coming weeks, I plan to introduce a personalized dashboard where you'll see only the services you rely on. You'll be able to subscribe to get alerts via email or Slack when these services malfunction so you can address it before it affects you, your customers, or your team.
In the future, I intend to add a community layer, where users can discuss issues with other users and share their experiences. Users could even report new incidents themselves, helping companies and other users stay informed.
Let me know your thoughts
I'd love to hear your thoughts about StatusSight:
Do you find it helpful? What features and services would you like to see?
Please reply and let me know.
Until next time,
- Lior
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