Paul Krill
Editor at Large

GitHub improves its status reporting

news
Dec 12, 20182 mins

More granular information will be provided on site issues

Electronic Health Records [EHR] / digital medical data, monitor health status, doctor, laptop
Credit: metamorworks / Getty Images

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.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

More from this author