GitHub has updated the status page on its popular code-sharing site to help developers find out as much information as possible on potential outages or site issues.
The site now lists individual component statuses that comprise the wider GitHub product. Git operations, for example, are now split out from API requests. Also, page builds can be tracked independently of notifications. Users can subscribe to different status reports via mechanisms including email, SMS, and webhook delivery. Subscriptions can follow the entire life cycle of incident, from investigation to remediation.
GitHub also has focused on improving and organizing information provided to users during an incident. The goal has been to change workflow to improve customer communication and reduce friction. To reach this goal, GitHub started decoupling the idea of a component status update, such as “Pages is experiencing degraded performance,” from the life cycle on the incident. Degraded performance could represent a wider incident, but updating its status does not allow for tracking and sharing mitigation steps and descriptive dates. Status updates are snapshots in time of a specific component, while incident are trackable communications between users and GitHub.
Until March 2019, GitHub will continue to support its old status site. Integrations can be moved over to the new site. GitHub will perform brownouts to help identify systems that could be pointing at a deprecated sit. In late February, a redirect will be added for web traffic to the new status page, with the old API to be shut down. The new site also will be tested on new systems. An incident response workflow test is planned for December 18 at 10 am PST.
