External Status Pages offer public audiences a unified source of truth about your infrastructure’s health. This feature can be customized to fit your brand’s look and feel, and you can define different views and sets of Business Services to display. Visitors can stay informed about ongoing incidents and read status updates, or subscribe to your status page to receive notifications via email.

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Pricing Plan Availability

The External Status Page feature is an add-on that must be paired with an Incident Response or Customer Service plan. Please contact our Sales Team for pricing details or if you would like to upgrade to a plan that includes the External Status Page feature.

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Required User Permissions

Users with the following base roles can configure an external status page:

• Manager
• Global Admin
• Account Owner

Create an External Status Page

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Prerequisites

External Status Pages rely on Business Services to automatically alert users when there is a service degradation. After you’ve configured service dependencies, information about impacted business services will appear on the External Status Page.

By default, an incident with a priority of P1 or P2 will be considered an "impacting" incident. You can adjust this setting to restrict or include a wider set of incident priorities, depending on your organization's needs.

Incident priority is an account-wide setting, and will apply to both Internal Status Pages and External Status Pages. Incident priority can also be configured via the REST API.

1. In the web app, navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click New Status Page.
3. Enter a descriptive Name for your status page, and in the Simple URL field, create a unique public subdomain that your users can access.
   • Note: After you've published an external status page, you will have the option to set a Custom URL, which will be used for sender address when email notifications are sent to status page subscribers. Please see the section Configure DNS Records for more information.

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Simple URL

The Simple URL cannot be changed after you have saved or published an external status page. Please take a moment to confirm that you've entered your Simple URL correctly.

4. Click Next.
5. In the Criteria section, select the Business Service(s) that you’d like to display on your status page by clicking next to each. Selected business services will be shown in the right column. To deselect them, click . Once you’re ready, click Next.
   • Optional: You can organize business services into groups:
     1. Click Add Group, enter a Group Name and press enter.
     2. Click and hold next to a business service's name, drag it over the group's name, and release.
     3. Press the expand arrow (e.g., /) to show/hide the business services in a group.
   • Optional: Click Edit Display Names to adjust your business services' public-facing names. This can be useful if you do not wish to disclose internal naming conventions, or to display a name that the public would better understand.
6. The Permissions section allows you to define which user roles can post incident status messages on the status page, whether status messages require approval, and whether you'd like to automate posts when an incident affects a business service. Make your selection in each of the following sections:

7. Click Next.
8. In the Theme tab of the Customize section, you can set the color palette, and upload your organization logo and a favicon that will be displayed on the browser tab.
9. In the Status Page tab, you can optionally add an image to the header and footer, set up a navigation bar, and you can include relevant links to your status page.
   • If you'd like to hide the Subscribe button on the public-facing status page, in the section Navigation Bar Subscribe Button, move the toggle to No.

10. Click Publish.

• Optionally, if you’re not ready to publish your status page, click Save as Draft in the bottom-left corner.

Configure DNS Records

After you publish an external status page, you can configure a Custom URL, which will be used for the sender address when email notifications are sent to status page subscribers. PagerDuty will generate a set of DNS records, each of which must be verified with your DNS provider in order for the Custom URL to work as expected.

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click next to the desired published status page and select Edit.
3. In the field Custom URL, enter your desired domain.

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Custom URL

The Custom URL cannot be changed after you have saved or published an external status page. Please take a moment to confirm that you've entered your Custom URL correctly.

4. Click Submit Custom URL.
5. Using the information in the section DNS Records, add each record in your provider's administration console.

6. Check the box I’ve added the records to my provider and click Verify Records.

After successful verification, the tag in the State column will change from Unverified to Verified. Depending on your DNS provider, record validation may take anywhere from a few minutes up to one or more days.

Please refer to your DNS provider's documentation for more information about adding DNS records and troubleshooting.

View the External Status Page

PagerDuty users can view an external status page by navigating to its unique public URL (e.g., https://subdomain.trust.pagerduty.com), or in the PagerDuty web app by navigating to Status External Status Page and selecting a status page's title from the list.

Edit an External Status Page

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click next to the desired status page and select Edit.
3. Make the desired changes to your External Status Page's the name, URL, business services, permissions, layout, and design.
4. When ready, click Publish.

Publish a Draft Status Page

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click next to the desired status page and select Publish.

View Incidents

You can see ongoing and resolved incidents, as well as pending communication approvals related to each of your External Status Pages.

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click next to the desired status page and select Incidents.
   a. Use the Ongoing Incidents tab to gain awareness of the incidents that are currently impacting the Business Services related to this External Status Page.
   b. The Resolved Incidents tab will let you see the history of past incidents.
   c. The Pending Approvals tab will display ad-hoc communications that need to be approved in order to be published on your External Status Page.
   d. Click New Incident to manually trigger a new incident in order to manually alert your user base about an issue.

Delete a Draft Status Page

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click next to the desired status page and select Delete.

Status Page Incidents

Status Page Incidents are different from the regular incidents that you or your monitoring tools may trigger on technical services. Status Page Incidents are bound to the status page only and are meant to be used to publish status updates and inform your external audience of the current status of an internal incident.

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Requirement

In order to post Status Page Incidents, incident Priority (an account-level setting) must be enabled.

Create a Status Page Incident

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click next to the desired status page and select Incidents.
3. Click + New Incident.
4. Give the Status Page Incident a descriptive title and write an initial message for External Status Page subscribers and visitors.
5. Select the incident status and the business service(s) it impacts.
6. Optional: Select the level of impact and the estimated time for your next update.

Publish a Status Update

To publish a new status update you’ll need to have an open Status Page Incident or a regular incident that is impacting a Business Service.

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click next to the desired status page and select Incidents.
3. In the open incidents list, click the ellipsis button next to the desired incident and select Post New Update.
4. Write a message for your External Status Page subscribers and visitors.
5. Select the incident status and the business service(s) it impacts.
6. Optional: Select the level of impact and the estimated time for your next update.

Approve a Status Update

When a status update requires approval, named approvers will receive an email notification, a banner will appear on a status page's Incidents screen, and the Pending Approvals tab will also indicate that there are updates that need review.

Users with appropriate permissions can approve pending status updates in the web app:

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click next to the desired status page and select Incidents.
3. Select the Pending Approvals tab.
4. Click next to the status update and select Review Post.
5. Review the details of the status update and click Publish.

Reject a Status Update

While following the approval steps above, you also have the option to Reject a status update. Click Reject and confirm your decision in the modal by clicking Yes, delete.

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Rejected Status Updates

Rejected status updates cannot be retrieved, and this action cannot be undone.

Edit a Status Update

Your users can add information or make changes to existing status updates.

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. Click next to the desired status page and select Incidents.
3. In the open incidents list, click next to the desired incident and select View Timeline & Edit.
4. Locate the status update that you need to update and click next to it. Make the necessary changes and click Update.
5. If you need to edit the impacted services, click icon under Business Services Impacted, select the desired business services, and then click Update.

Subscribe to Status Updates

Depending on the context, you can subscribe to a status page in multiple ways:

• In the Subscriber Console
• On the Public-Facing Status Page

In the Subscriber Console

You can subscribe yourself or another user to receive status updates via email.

1. In the web app, navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. To the right of your desired status page, click Subscribers.

3. Click Add Subscriber.
4. In the modal, enter a user's email address and select Status Page or Business Services.
   • If you select Status Page, the user with be notified for all incidents and updates to this status page.
   • If you select Business Services, please enter one or more Business Services. This option only notifies the user when there is a status page update related to their selected business service(s).

5. Click Add.

Subscribed users will receive an email notification whenever there is an incident on the status page or their selected business services.

On the Public-Facing Status Page

You can also subscribe to a status page from its public URL.

1. Visit a status page's public URL, e.g., https://status-page.trust.pagerduty.com/.
2. In the top-right, click Subscribe to Updates.
3. In the modal, enter your email address and select which business services you'd like to be notified for. To receive notifications for all incidents on this status page, leave the default selection, All Services.
4. Click Subscribe.

5. You should receive a confirmation email; open it and click Confirm your subscription.
6. On the following page, click Yes, subscribe.

Unsubscribe from Status Updates

There are two places to unsubscribe from a status page:

• In the Subscriber Console
• In a Status Update Email

In the Subscriber Console

As an admin, you may wish to unsubscribe a user from a status page.

1. Navigate to Status External Status Page.
2. To the right of your desired status page, select Subscribers.
3. To the right of the desired users, select Delete.
4. Read the warning modal and click Yes, delete.

In a Status Update Email

Users can unsubscribe themselves from a status page using a link in an email notification.

1. Open an email related to a status page update and click Manage your subscription at the bottom.
2. Click Yes, unsubscribe.

FAQ

Who will be able to access the status page externally?

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Once you publish an external status page, any end-user will be able to access it at its public URL.

Can I customize my public URL?

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Yes, you can customize the public URL while creating or editing a status page.

What is a subscriber?

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A subscriber is any user on the internet that has opted in to receive communications about incidents in your External Status Page.

How can I customize my page layout?

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You can customize the layout of your External Status Page during the Customize step while creating or editing a status page.