A status page is a public page that says whether your site is up, which part is affected, and what you last told visitors. Setup is five jobs: create the page, add the monitors that should appear on it, point a custom domain at it if your plan includes one, turn on subscribers, and post an update when something fails. This guide does those jobs in Visual Sentinel.
Create the page
Open Status Pages and choose New status page. The form asks for a name and an address. The name is what visitors read at the top. The address becomes the public URL: visualsentinel.com/status/ plus the address. The button that creates it is Create page. Pick an address you can keep. Changing it later breaks any link you have already sent.
The form has a switch labelled Public. Leave it on if anyone with the link should open the page. To limit it to a client, open the page, find Who can see it, and choose Password or Private. Password asks for a password of at least 4 characters. Private means visitors cannot open it.
Visual Sentinel includes 1 status page on Solo and Starter, 5 on Business ($80/month, 60 monitors) and 50 on Agency ($300/month). One page is enough for a single site. Use a second page when a client should not see another client's components.
Add monitors and components
Open the new page and choose Add sites. Pick the checks that should appear as components: uptime for the site, SSL if visitors need to know the certificate is valid, DNS if a record change would take the site offline, and performance, visual or content checks only if a visitor would understand the result. Add servers is there too, if a server should appear on the page.
A failed check on a linked monitor is what moves that component off operational. An uptime check that is not on the page can still alert you. It just does not change what visitors see.
Group monitors if the flat list is hard to read. A shop might use Website, Checkout and Email. You can sort the list by hand, alphabetically, or by current status. Do this before you share the URL. An empty page, or a page full of internal hostnames, tells visitors nothing useful.
Custom domain via CNAME
Solo and Starter use the visualsentinel.com/status address. Custom domains are on Business and Agency.
On the status page, under Your domain, enter a subdomain such as status.yourcompany.com and choose Use this domain. The panel then shows two records. Add both at your DNS provider. One is a CNAME for the subdomain, pointing at status.visualsentinel.com. The other is a TXT record named _visualsentinel followed by the subdomain, with the value the panel shows. Do not point the root domain at it. A CNAME belongs on the subdomain.
DNS changes can take time to show up. When both records resolve, click Check again. The confirmation says the domain is verified and that SSL will be provisioned automatically. Until that check succeeds, the chip stays on Not set and the visualsentinel.com/status address keeps working. Share that address first if you cannot wait for DNS.
If the domain is already on a Cloudflare account you have connected, Set up DNS with Cloudflare creates both records for you and runs the check.
Subscribers
On the status page, the Subscribe button switch lets visitors enter an email address on the public page. They get a confirmation message first, and only a confirmed address receives incident emails. The subscriber count includes addresses that are not confirmed yet. The list marks each one Confirmed or Not confirmed.
Confirmed subscribers get an email when a check fails and an incident opens, and again when that incident is resolved. Posting an update does not email them by itself. The confirmation step is what limits this to people who asked for it.
Incident updates
A failed check opens an incident in your account, and that incident shows on the public status page straight away. Open it and post an update saying what is affected, what you know, and whether you are still looking or have a fix. The update shows on the incident in your account and on every public status page where that incident appears. The email subscribers already received is the one sent when the incident opened, not this update.
Post again when the state changes. Post when you know the cause, and post when the service is back. A page that stays on "investigating" after the site has recovered is worse than a late first update, because the next visitor has no reason to trust the page.
For planned work, open Maintenance and choose Plan maintenance. Give it a title, the sites it covers, and a start and end. Visitors who check the page during that window see it under Scheduled maintenance instead of a red component with no explanation.
Check it before you share the link
- Open the public URL in a private window. Confirm the components are the ones you added, and that internal names are not showing.
- If you use a custom domain, confirm the CNAME target is status.visualsentinel.com and that the chip says Verified. Open the custom domain in the same private window.
- Subscribe with an address you control. Confirm the verification email arrives, and confirm the address.
- Post a short test update on a test incident and confirm it appears on the public page. Posting an update does not send a subscriber email.
- Mark the test incident resolved, or delete the test update, before you send the link to customers.
Then put the URL in the place people already look when something breaks: the footer, the support reply, and the alert your own team receives. A status page nobody is sent to does not reduce tickets.
What other tools include
UptimeRobot includes 1 basic status page on Free (50 monitors, 5-minute checks, no custom domain). Custom design and your own domain start on Solo, at $13/month billed monthly or $12 billed annually. Better Stack includes 1 status page on Free (10 monitors, 3-minute checks). Incident management is on the Responder plan, at $34/month or $29 billed annually. OneUptime's Growth plan is $20 per user per month billed yearly and includes incident management (its page title says plans start from $22/user). Openstatus's Starter plan is $30/month and includes status pages and 20 monitors. The project is open source (AGPL-3.0) if you want to host it yourself. StatusCake tests from 43 locations in 30 countries. Status pages are a separate paid product, StatusCake Pages, from $12.46 a month. Pingdom includes one public status page. Its plans start at $16.50/month billed annually or $18 monthly for 10 uptime checks.
Visual Sentinel vs UptimeRobot and Visual Sentinel vs Pingdom compare the checks behind the page, not just the page.
What to put on the page
Show checks a visitor can understand. Is the site up. Is the certificate still valid. Did a DNS record change. Is the page slow. Visual Sentinel checks uptime, SSL, DNS, performance, visual changes and content. You do not need every check on the public page. Put the ones a customer would ask about. Keep the rest in the dashboard, where they can still alert you.
New accounts can run a first check with no card, then start a 7-day trial (card required) or subscribe from $15/month.
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Check a site freeCommon questions
What does status page setup involve?
Create the page, add the sites that should appear as components, add both the CNAME and the TXT record if your plan includes a custom domain, turn on the subscribe button, and post an incident update when a check fails. The incident is already on the public page before you post. Confirm a test update on the public page before you share the link.
How many status pages does Visual Sentinel include?
Solo and Starter include 1 status page. Business includes 5. Agency includes 50. Custom domains are on Business and Agency.
How do I put a status page on my own domain?
On Business or Agency, enter the subdomain under Your domain and choose Use this domain. Add the CNAME pointing at status.visualsentinel.com and the TXT record the panel shows. Click Check again once both resolve. SSL is provisioned automatically after the domain is verified.
Do subscribers get an email every time a check fails?
No. Visitors confirm an email address first. A failed check opens an incident and emails confirmed subscribers at that point. Posting an update does not email them again.
What free tools support SSL alerts on status pages?
StatusCake's free tier includes SSL monitoring. UptimeRobot's SSL monitoring is on paid plans only. Visual Sentinel sends default reminders 13, 3 and 1 days before expiry.
