Subscribing to status notifications

Being told about an incident rather than discovering it. Two subscriptions, five minutes, and it changes how an outage feels.

Being told about an incident rather than discovering it. Two subscriptions, five minutes, and it changes how an outage feels.

Subscribe

1. Open the Zendesk status page.
2. Subscribe to updates.
3. Choose your pod, so you are not notified about everybody else's.
4. Add a second recipient besides yourself.

Filter to your pod

Subscribing to everything produces notifications about infrastructure you do not use, and within a month nobody reads them. Filtering is what keeps the alerts meaningful.

Two recipients, not one

One person is on holiday when it matters. A shared mailbox or a team channel is better than any individual, and it survives people changing jobs.

Why it changes the experience

Knowing at the start of an incident means you can tell customers before they tell you. Finding out forty minutes in, from an agent, means you spent forty minutes investigating your own configuration.

Include planned maintenance

Less urgent and worth having. Maintenance during your busiest hour is worth knowing about in advance, and occasionally worth planning around.

Say what happens when one arrives

Who checks whether it affects you, who tells the team, who decides about telling customers. An alert reaching an inbox where nobody knows what to do with it achieves very little.

See also

• Monitoring your account on the Zendesk status page
• Designating an address for security notifications
• Finding your way around Admin Center