servicestatus

Service status is the current operational condition of a service, component, or system, used to communicate availability, performance, and reliability to users and operators. It typically reflects whether the service is fully functional, experiencing degraded performance, partially available, or completely unavailable, and may also indicate planned maintenance.

Common status states include operational, degraded performance, partial outage, outage, and maintenance. Some organizations distinguish between planned maintenance and unplanned incidents, and may use color codes or simple labels to convey urgency. In multi-region or multi-service environments, status can be aggregated to reflect overall health as well as component-level health.

Status is determined through monitoring and telemetry. Health checks and synthetic tests run at regular intervals to verify responsiveness and correctness. Liveness probes confirm that a process is running; readiness probes indicate if a service is prepared to handle traffic. Observed metrics, traces, and logs contribute to classifying the current state. Public status dashboards or pages summarize health across components and regions, while internal dashboards support on-call responders and incident coordination.

Interfaces and data formats vary by system. Applications may expose endpoints such as /health or /status that return machine-readable and human-readable status information. Public status pages may provide incident timelines, impact assessments, and expected restoration times. Status data is often linked to service-level objectives (SLOs) and service-level indicators (SLIs) to set expectations and measure reliability.

Best practices include clear, unambiguous state definitions, timely updates during incidents, historical context, and consistent communication across services and regions. Effective service status reduces user confusion and supports rapid remediation.