Increasing Transparency on the Wistia Status Page
January 21, 2015
Topic tags
James Zhang
Alumni
Have you visited the new Wistia Status Page that we implemented in November? The status page is the best place to find the latest updates and alerts on the health of our systems. Noticing a delay in stats or having trouble uploading a video? The status page might be able to illuminate the reason why the problems are happening and give you a better idea of when they’ll be fixed.
On the new status page, you’ll find:
- A note whenever a critical piece of our infrastructure experiences problems.
- Any scheduled maintenance windows (when we know ahead of time that parts of the application will be taken down).
- An option to subscribe to updates via email or SMS, so you’ll be the first to hear about potential problems.
- Current and historic trends, like how many videos are in the processing queue (the lower this number, the shorter your videos are waiting in line before they’re ready to be embedded), or how quickly heatmaps appear for your video after someone watches it.
Why share all of this information?
Because Wistia is made up of several modular components, each comprised of many servers in the cloud, there are many possible points of failure. Together, the four components — uploading, embedding, stats, and the Wistia application — form the Wistia experience that you know. While most of the the time they work seamlessly together to provide a delightful experience for you, we architect our infrastructure to account for the unexpected. For example, when the network goes down, or when an emergency upgrade and restart is required on our servers, we believe in full transparency and keeping you in the loop.
These metrics are not only good for our customers to know, but also great for our product and engineering team. As we make improvements to our infrastructure, these numbers give us a measurable way to gauge effectiveness and impact.
A shout out to Statuspage.io
If the status page seems familiar to you, it’s probably because you’ve seen a similar version of it elsewhere. We’re using StatusPage.io to host the page and make updates to it. They’ve built an incredibly simple yet powerful platform that’s improving experiences for both customers and businesses. We highly recommend giving them a try if your company is looking for a new status page!