When your service goes down, the first thing users do is look for information. If they can't find it, they flood your support queue, post on social media, and lose confidence in your product. A public status page gives them a single, reliable place to check — and gives your team a structured way to communicate during incidents.
Vigilmon includes a public status page in every plan, including the free tier. This guide walks through everything: creating and configuring your status page, adding services, customizing the appearance, embedding status badges, and communicating effectively during incidents.
What Vigilmon's Status Page Includes
Before getting into setup, here's what you get:
- Automatic status updates: when a monitor goes down or recovers, the status page updates in real time without manual intervention
- Historical uptime data: per-service uptime percentages visible to your users
- Incident history: a timeline of past incidents that builds trust and shows operational maturity
- Public URL: a dedicated public page your users can bookmark and share
- Status badges: embeddable badges for your website, README, or documentation
- Custom domain support: use your own domain (e.g.,
status.yourdomain.com) on paid plans
No additional cost. No separate vendor. No third-party integration required.
Step 1: Create Your Vigilmon Account and First Monitor
If you don't have a Vigilmon account yet, go to vigilmon.online and sign up. The free tier gives you five monitors, a public status page, and no expiry date.
After signing up:
- Click Add Monitor in the dashboard
- Enter the URL you want to monitor (e.g.,
https://api.yourapp.com/health) - Choose your check frequency (1 minute on free, 30 seconds on Pro)
- Select monitoring regions — pick at least three geographic regions for meaningful multi-region consensus
- Optionally enter a keyword that must appear in the response body to consider the check successful (e.g.,
"status":"ok") - Click Save
Your monitor is now active. Repeat for each service or endpoint you want on your status page.
Step 2: Configure Your Status Page
Navigate to Status Page in the Vigilmon dashboard.
Name Your Status Page
Give the page a title that your users will recognize. This is typically your company name or product name — for example, "Acme API Status" or "Example SaaS Platform Status."
Add a Description
A brief description tells users what they're looking at. Keep it short:
Current status for Acme API services. This page updates automatically when any service goes down or recovers.
Select Which Monitors to Show
You can choose which of your monitors appear on the status page. Not everything needs to be public. For example:
- Include: Production API, website, checkout endpoint, payment integration
- Exclude: Staging environments, internal admin endpoints, test monitors
For each included monitor, you can customize the display name. Instead of showing the raw URL (https://api.yourapp.com/health), name it something user-friendly like "API" or "Checkout Service."
Set Your Status Page URL
Vigilmon provides a public URL for your status page automatically. On paid plans, you can configure a custom domain so the page lives at status.yourdomain.com.
Step 3: Customize the Status Page Appearance
A status page is a trust surface. It's often the first place users land during an incident, and how it looks reflects on your operational maturity.
Display Name and Branding
Set your company or product name so users immediately recognize the page. On paid plans, you can upload a logo and adjust the color scheme to match your brand.
Monitor Display Names
As mentioned above: use human-readable names for each service rather than raw URLs. Your users don't need to know that your API is at api-v2.internal.yourapp.com. They need to know whether the "API" is up or down.
Recommended naming conventions:
| Raw Monitor URL | Display Name |
|---|---|
| https://yourapp.com | Website |
| https://api.yourapp.com/health | API |
| https://api.yourapp.com/v2/checkout | Checkout |
| https://dashboard.yourapp.com | Dashboard |
| TCP check: db.internal:5432 | Database |
Uptime History Display
Vigilmon shows uptime percentage over the last 30, 60, or 90 days per service. Showing historical uptime builds confidence: users can see that your service has maintained 99.9% uptime over the past quarter, not just that it's up right now.
Step 4: Embed a Status Badge
A status badge gives your users inline visibility into your service status without them having to navigate to the status page. Common placements:
- Website footer: "System status: All systems operational ✓"
- Documentation site: badge in the top navigation or sidebar
- GitHub README: shows potential users and contributors your current operational status
- Support portal: redirects to the status page for incident context
Getting the Badge Code
In Vigilmon's status page settings, find the Badge section. You'll see two embed options:
Markdown (for README files, documentation):
[](https://your-status-page-url)
HTML (for websites):
<a href="https://your-status-page-url">
<img src="https://vigilmon.online/badge/your-page-id.svg" alt="System Status" />
</a>
The badge updates dynamically — it shows green when all systems are operational and red when any monitored service is experiencing an incident.
Step 5: Using the Status Page During Incidents
This is where the real value is. An automatic status page that updates when monitors go down is table stakes — the communication layer on top is what turns incident response from chaos into a controlled process.
What Happens Automatically
When Vigilmon detects a confirmed outage (a quorum of regional probes failing to reach your endpoint):
- The status page immediately shows the affected service as "Outage" or "Degraded"
- Configured alert channels fire (Slack, email, webhook)
- The incident appears in the incident history timeline with a start timestamp
This happens within 1–2 minutes of the outage starting. No manual intervention required.
Posting Incident Updates
For significant incidents, your team should post manual updates to give users context and estimated resolution timelines. In Vigilmon's dashboard, you can post incident notes that appear on the status page:
Initial acknowledgment (within 5 minutes of detection):
We are investigating an issue affecting the API. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.
Identified update (when you know the cause):
We have identified an issue with our database connection pool caused by a configuration change deployed at 14:23 UTC. We are rolling back the change. Estimated resolution: 15–20 minutes.
Resolution (when service recovers):
The API has recovered. Root cause was a database connection pool exhaustion following a configuration change. We are implementing additional safeguards to prevent recurrence. Post-mortem will be published within 24 hours.
Incident Communication Best Practices
Acknowledge fast, explain slower: The first update should come within 5 minutes of detection, even if it's just "We are investigating." Users need to know someone is aware before they need to know the root cause.
Use plain language: Avoid technical jargon in status updates. "Database connection pool exhaustion" can be "We are experiencing API issues." Save the technical detail for the post-mortem.
Set realistic time estimates: If you say "15 minutes," users check back in 15 minutes. If you're wrong, update the estimate early rather than letting the original estimate expire without communication.
Mark as resolved promptly: When Vigilmon's probes confirm recovery, update the incident status on the page. Don't let an "investigating" notice linger after the service has recovered.
Publish a post-mortem: For significant incidents, a brief post-mortem published within 24–48 hours on the status page or as a blog post builds substantial trust. It shows that your team understood what happened and is preventing recurrence.
Step 6: Setting Up a Custom Domain (Paid Plans)
On Vigilmon's Pro plan, you can serve your status page from your own domain — status.yourapp.com — instead of the default Vigilmon subdomain.
DNS Configuration
- In Vigilmon's status page settings, navigate to Custom Domain
- Enter your desired subdomain (e.g.,
status.yourapp.com) - Add a CNAME record in your DNS provider pointing
statusto Vigilmon's status page host (shown in the settings) - Wait for DNS propagation (typically 5–60 minutes)
- Vigilmon automatically provisions an SSL certificate for your custom domain
Why Custom Domains Matter
- Brand consistency: Users see
status.yourapp.com, notyourapp.vigilmon.online - Trust: A custom domain signals a mature operational posture
- Bookmarking and sharing: Your support team, customers, and incident responders can find the page at a predictable URL that's part of your domain
Recommendations for SaaS Teams and Agencies
For SaaS Teams
Monitor at least these four endpoints:
- Public website (
https://yourapp.com) — the first thing users will check - API health endpoint (
https://api.yourapp.com/health) — critical for apps with a separate frontend/backend - Authentication endpoint — login failures are the most visible user-facing failure mode
- Payment/checkout endpoint — revenue-critical path that users will notice immediately
Display them on your status page with user-facing names. Set up Slack alerts to your #incidents channel so your team is notified before users are.
For Agencies Managing Client Sites
Create a separate Vigilmon workspace (or separate account) per client, or use named groups to organize client monitors. Your status page can include all client sites, or you can create per-client status pages for clients who want their own public-facing status URL.
For agencies, the status page also serves as an internal dashboard: a single page showing the operational status of every client site you maintain, updated automatically from your monitoring infrastructure.
Troubleshooting Common Issues
Status badge shows error instead of status: Check that your badge URL includes the correct page ID from your Vigilmon settings. The ID is unique to your status page.
Monitor shows "down" on the status page but site is loading: Vigilmon's multi-region consensus means the status reflects what multiple independent probes see, not what your local browser sees. Check if the failure is regional — your local ISP routing may differ from international probe routing.
Status page not updating automatically: Verify that the monitors you want on the status page are selected in the status page configuration. Newly added monitors need to be explicitly added to the page.
Custom domain SSL not provisioning: Allow up to 30 minutes after DNS propagation for SSL certificate provisioning. If it's still failing, verify the CNAME record is correctly pointing to Vigilmon's host, not your origin server.
Conclusion
A status page is one of the highest-leverage investments you can make in user trust. It shifts incident communication from reactive (users messaging support, posting on Twitter) to proactive (users checking a page and seeing what's happening). The cost is setup time measured in minutes, not months.
Vigilmon's included status page means there's no reason to defer this. Set up your monitors, configure your status page with human-readable service names, embed a badge on your website, and you have a professional incident communication surface running in under an hour.
When the next outage happens — and it will — your users will see a page that tells them you know about it, you're working on it, and here's when to expect an update. That's the difference between a support queue that floods and a user base that waits patiently.
Set up your status page for free at vigilmon.online — included in every plan, no configuration required.
Tags: #monitoring #devops #statuspage #uptime #incident #saas #webdevelopment