Vendor Outage Monitoring for MSPs: Per-Client Status Pages and Custom Dashboards
Introduction
Handling client calls when a third-party vendor has an outage - this will sound familiar if you are a managed service provider (MSP). Your first instinct would be to check if the vendor's status page or social media handle shows anything, or check crowdsourced websites like Downdetector. Or even ask your client to check themselves.
These approaches do not scale when you have more than a few clients, many vendor status pages to check, and clients with different stacks. Public status pages do not always show your client specific issues (e.g. Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure). Crowdsourced websites can have false positives, and you are delegating something that you should have handled yourself to a third-party website.
This article is about two different strategies you can use to close the gap. Both give your clients an automatically updated status view of the third-party SaaS and Cloud services they depend on, with data gathered from official sources, under your brand. One is a hosted, white-labeled status page you switch on and never have to build. The other is a dashboard you build yourself on top of a live data feed. Which one fits your situation depends on whether you have developers and what you've already got running.
