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after several minutes the status page is still showing all is fine.

For a service like GH, anything more than 30 secs is unacceptable

That is very unrealistic. Infrastructure monitoring at that scale won't even be collecting metrics at that interval.

And simple HTTP monitoring would be too flappy for a public status page.

What monitoring tools are you using? I know a ton that can do 30 seconds or less at scale. I'm fact, I'm pretty sure all the big players can do that.