5 posts tagged with "SaaS"

Last updated on August 12, 2026.

Introduction​

On August 6, 2026, GitHub opened an incident for degraded Actions performance at 15:22 UTC. Within about twenty minutes, Actions availability was listed as degraded, workflow runs were failing to start or failing partway through, and the Actions REST API was returning errors. Pages was pulled into the same incident shortly afterwards. The status page marked Actions and Pages as mitigated at 00:05 UTC on August 7, and closed the incident at 02:04 UTC.

What the live updates showed at the time was a multi-hour recovery through constrained capacity, throttled webhooks, invalid job assignment, and self-hosted runner problems - followed by cleanup work that continued after the incident was marked resolved. GitHub added a root cause analysis to the incident page on 11 August 2026, appended to the 7 August resolve post rather than as a separate update.

Introduction​

This is an updated and expanded version of the older guide.

According to the 2025 State of SaaS report, organizations use an average of 106 SaaS apps.

Staying on top of your SaaS vendors' status is as important as monitoring your own services. The Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud outages in 2025 were strong reminders of this fact. As a result of these outages, many SaaS services that depend on them experienced outages as well, leading to a cascading effect which took down hundreds of vendors and affected thousands of users. Cloud and SaaS outages are not isolated any longer but usually happen in groups due to the dependency chain.

This article aims to be a comprehensive guide on how to monitor the uptime status of your SaaS and Cloud vendors.

Introduction​

Last updated on August 8, 2025.

Modern businesses depend heavily on Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS is not limited to being used by software development teams. Almost all aspects of business operations - accounting, HR, payroll, marketing, IT, sales, support - depend on one or more SaaS applications. Given this dependency on SaaS applications, their uptime becomes tightly tied to a business's uptime. Any SaaS downtime can affect both a business's daily operations as well as the user experience. Measuring the uptime of SaaS providers is a critical part of your incident management process and business continuity plan.

How to check if a SaaS is experiencing downtime? Follow the steps below:

Chances are, most of your third-party cloud and SaaS dependencies are globally distributed and have many regions of operation. Chances are, your applications use a subset of a cloud or SaaS service. If you are monitoring such a service, why should you receive alerts for all regions or every single component in the service?

E.g. if you use Digital Ocean, you might be using Kubernetes in their US locations (NYC and SFO). You would want to know only when there is an outage in one of these locations. Digital Ocean's status page gives you the option to subscribe to outages across the board - it’s all or nothing. This is the case with most services with a few exceptions.

Choosing Specific Components to Monitor​

You can now choose which components/regions you wish to monitor in IncidentHub. Let us continue with our Digital Ocean example.

You can choose to monitor all components:

Why should you monitor your third-party Cloud and SaaS vendors if you are in SRE/Ops?

As part of an SRE team, your primary responsibility is ensuring the reliability of your applications. What makes you responsible for monitoring services that you don't even manage? Third-party services are just like yours - with SLAs. And outages happen, affecting you as well as many others who depend on them.

It's a no-brainer that you should know when such outages happen to be on top of things if/when it affects your running applications.

Most of your third party dependencies will have a public status page or a Twitter account where they publish updates on their outages. Here are some seemingly easy ways to monitor these pages

• Subscribe to the RSS feed of these pages
• Follow the Twitter account
• Sign up for Slack, Email, SMS notifications on the status page itself if the page supports these