Blog
StackWitness blog
Honest notes about measuring dependencies from the outside. We ping hosts for reachability and read vendor self-reports. We do not invent green, and we do not issue compliance verdicts.
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When the control plane is down and the data plane is up
DigitalOcean's late-August API and control-panel incident left running Droplets up while creates and dashboard access failed. How to separate control-plane pain from host reachability without inventing calm green.
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What to put on a customer status page during a vendor incident
When a dependency is degraded and your product feels it, customers need measurement language, not a calm green badge. A practical template from the August 2026 GitHub outage.
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Partial outages: why one green average lies
When one product is red and the rest look fine, a single operational badge hides the real story. How to read component status, region disagreement, and host reachability without inventing calm green.
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Is it you or your vendor? A 3am playbook
When checkout fails at 3am, stop guessing. A practical playbook for separating your stack from a dependency using independent reachability and vendor status pages.
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Why vendor status pages cannot be trusted alone
Vendor status pages are useful self-reports, not independent measurement. Why teams need an outside reachability check before telling customers everything is fine.
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How we measure: reachability vs self-report
How StackWitness measures dependency hosts: multi-region reachability probes plus vendor status feeds. What reachable means, and what we never claim.