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New GitHub Status Site

github.com

115 pointsremi18 comments

Looks like they were smart and are using Rackspace for the main github and AWS for the status site. That's 101 for status sites.

I slightly wonder if it's worth putting status sites in a separate domain as well, for resilience against DNS outages or misconfiguration. Obviously you'd also want status.example.com for example.com too, but having some standard way for services to report uptime (to users and to machines, including deep API information, not just "can I ping it" would be nice.

It would be nice if someone set up "arbitraryservicedowntime.net" and did things like github.com.arbitraryservicedowntime.net". But then you'd need some way to associate and promote the independent URLs. Just doing github.com and github.net might work, if github.net is otherwise unused.

Pingdom kind of solves this for just ping, but doesn't work for deep status, causes, ETTR, etc.

I'm a bit clueless about network resilience, but doesn't using the url status.github.com imply the status and main website share a DNS service? We have seen name resolution problems in the past so would a DNS problem that affected github.com would also affect status.github.com?

doesn't using the url status.github.com imply the status and main website share a DNS service?

No, but in this case they do.

would a DNS problem that affected github.com also affect status.github.com?

Yes, but DNS is very easy to harden against outages, it's redundant by design.

Also Github seems to rent their nameservers from dyn.com who have a pretty good track record of not screwing up.

I liked the "Battle Station Fully Operational" before.

Yeah I miss the changing Octocat.

They link to https://status.github.com which doesn't work (you have to go to http://status.github.com). Bit of egg on their face, sadly.

The status site now supports SSL and auto-redirects regular HTTP traffic to HTTPs.

The blog post has been updated to go to http://status.github.com, my apologies about that.

Do you know if there are plans to make it available on https://status.github.com as well?

Yeah, I have the HTTPS Everywhere Chrome extension, which (almost) always works but breaks here. Made it look like the status page was down.

Yes.

There's two posts on status pages on the HN homepage right now. This and Balanced:

- http://blog.balancedpayments.com/status-page/

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877643

The hardest problems to me are properly monitoring and computing downtime. Heroku's uptime calculation uses time[1], which breaks down for an API where it should be more about the number of requests.

Any idea how Github is measuring downtime? Is there a difference in Github's measurement for when there's low usage vs. going down during peak hours? How are sporadic errors computed vs. a complete outage?

[1] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-status#uptime-c...

Right now I get an "The server refused the connection.". Not good.

[edit] ok, use http, not https...

The status site now handles both HTTP and HTTPS gracefully.

I miss the whimsical nature of the previous status page (it seemed to fit with GitHub's "voice" better). But I'm guessing this version isn't going to crash when GitHub does (https://github.com/blog/1261-github-availability-this-week). Hopefully it's statically generated.

Do you have negative letter-spacing on large counters? "662ms" under "98th perc. web response time" has virtually no spacing between the glyphs. Looks messed up, border-line illegible. That's on Mobile Safari.

Looks great overall though. Nice job, guys.

The visual design and choice of typeface are both excellent.

Great job.

I love the board's minimalistic approach - excellent job!

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