Accessing external data for metrics
Asked by digitalpigeon:

Hi all,

This question is so basic, I feel like I'm missing something fundamental.

We are an established SaaS org with 1000s of internal metrics across our infrastructure and services, tracked in many different 3rd party systems, as well as custom monitoring software, that has evolved over 20+ years.

We want to use Statuspage to provide subsets of this data as customer friendly component level availability information.

I thought this was exactly what Statuspage was for - but I can't find anywhere in Statuspage on how to define a component to "go and get" its status information. There is the email automation, and there is a Statuspage API - but Statuspage needs to call OTHER APIs and collect data from OTHER sources.

Specifically, we need Statuspage to call RESTful APIs on existing systems to collect status information. Does Statuspage not do this? (The two main sources of this data we'd like to start with are PRTG and Fortimanager - but ultimately there are about a dozen different sources we need to go to.)

It looks like the expectation perhaps is that we need to write custom external orchestration apps to do this, and then have those apps call Statuspage's API with the results? I feel like I'm missing something, as it seems like Status software should be able to collect its own statuses.

Thanks for any help anyone can provide. I've really been excited about this software for some time, and now that we have the budget to proceed, I'm a little surprised that this was a roadblock.


Answers:
author: Jesse Klein
body: Hello!

This is Jesse from the Statuspage support team. Welcome to community and thanks for the question around components and presenting that information to users. Statuspage is mainly used to be an incident communication tool so that when there is a big problem, you have a place to let stakeholders know what is going on and that you are addressing the incident.

For a little bit of background, the original philosophy was to limit automation as the belief was that real humans communicating brought trust that an issue was being handled. That as a result, has lead to some limited automation tools in the past.

Email automation and the API are some of the main ways to pull component data for components but we also have integrations with tools like Opsgenie and Pagerduty, that are incident management and monitoring tools that can consolidate the data and send that over to Statuspage for the communication side. I would check out some of the different apps here: <https://support.atlassian.com/statuspage/docs/automate-actions-with-integrations/>

I totally understand the cases where you have a lot of components on your page. Automation seems like the only way to really manage that aspect. I'd love to hear a little more about your use case and see if I can bring anything to the attention of our team through a feature request.

If you haven't already, I would also recommend taking a look at <https://support.atlassian.com/statuspage/docs/read-the-statuspage-user-guide/> for more general information for getting setup and for some tips on incident communication as a whole. Hopefully that would be helpful for you and your team. If you are trialing Statuspage, feel free to also open a ticket with us on the support side and we would be happy to try and answer more questions there as well. I hope you have a great day!

Regards,  
Jesse


Tags: api

cloud

collection

rest

source