Status Page vs Incident Page: What Is the Difference?

What this guide covers

People use "status page" and "incident page" interchangeably, but they do different jobs. This guide draws the line: the status page is the always-on view of whether your services are healthy right now; the incident page is the focused, time-ordered record of one specific outage. Understanding the difference keeps your public communication easy to scan.

• The status page answers "is it working right now?"
• The incident page carries the detailed timeline of one outage.
• Mixing the two makes the public page harder to scan.

Two jobs, two audiences

The status page serves the customer who wants a fast yes/no on whether a service works — they glance, get their answer, and leave. The incident page (or incident timeline) serves the customer who is actively affected and wants to follow along: what happened, what you are doing, and how it progressed. The same person may want both at different moments, which is why the two live together but stay visually distinct.

How they work together

In practice, the status page is the front door and the incident timeline is the story behind a specific door that is currently red. A component shows "degraded"; clicking through reveals the incident with its chronological updates. Keeping component state and incident narrative separate lets each do its job: the component answers "now," the timeline answers "what is going on."

How Sandglass supports the practice

Use the Sandglass status page for live component state, backed by checks, so it is always current. When an incident occurs, its updates attach to that incident as a timeline — investigating, identified, monitoring, resolved — without cluttering the at-a-glance component view that customers rely on for a quick answer.

• Back the practices here with HTTP, ping, TCP, content, SSL certificate, and heartbeat checks.
• Route incidents to email, Slack webhook channels, and generic webhooks so the right people respond fast.
• Use a public status page to keep customers informed while the team works the incident.

Common mistakes to avoid

Combining every investigation note into the public status page makes it harder to scan when users only need current availability. The person checking "is checkout down?" should get that answer in one glance, not have to read through a running log of engineering hypotheses.