What are the advantages of using a Current status in applications?

Question

It is common that during certain moments an application goes off the air for an important update or for some reason it is already slow. Companies that have many services choose to use a status that informs whether a particular service is functioning normally as the gitlab status or status aws. But what is the advantage of using this resource?

In my view it is a good show to the customer that the service is available or not, but to a team that manages and develops has some advantage? I don’t find any information about this content, but I feel that this has a great importance for a project management.

Answer 1

These monitoring services you refer to are actually the foundation of all SRE (Site Reliability Engineering).

In short, no system is immune to failure. And as the software architecture evolved from monolithic applications to distributed cloud applications, more complex and error-prone were the deployment and maintenance processes of these services in production.

And the SRE aims to increase the reliability of services, automate deployment processes, monitor services, collect application health statistics, anticipate problems that may impair application performance, design fault tolerance mechanisms and react quickly should any problems occur.

If you can’t monitor a service, you don’t know what’s going on, and if you don’t know what’s going on, your service may not be reliable.

N. Murphy, J. Petoff, C.Jones, B. Beyer - Site Reliability Engineering

And by making these monitoring services publicly available, you increase the transparency of the organization, you justify engineering investments with statistics, and you increase the trust that users have in your services.