Quick Start Guide

Five steps to a fully functional status dashboard. Follow them in order during your trial or first production setup.

Step 1: Create components

Components represent the individual services or systems you track on your status dashboards (for example API, Web App, Payment Processing, CDN).

1. Go to Components
2. Click Add Component
3. Fill in:
   • Name — something short and recognizable (e.g. "API" or "Website")
   • Description — optional context shown alongside the component (up to 150 characters)
4. Click Add component

The component is immediately live with an Operational status. Your plan limits how many components you can create.

Step 2: Create a dashboard

A status dashboard is a public page at a subdomain such as acme.statusdashboard.io, or at your custom domain if that is on your plan.

1. Go to Dashboards
2. Click Add Dashboard
3. Enter:
   • Name — internal label shown in your admin list
   • Subdomain — the unique URL slug (lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens; e.g. acme)
4. Click Create dashboard

The dashboard is live right away at https://<subdomain>.statusdashboard.io. You are taken to its settings page to add components and configure it further.

Step 3: Attach components to the dashboard

1. Open the dashboard you just created and switch to the Components tab
2. Check the components you want to display on this status dashboard
3. Drag to set their display order (or assign them to groups if enabled)
4. Save your changes

The same component can be added to multiple dashboards with independent ordering.

Step 4: Add subscribers

The trial checklist counts any human subscriber (email, SMS, or WhatsApp). On a trial, email is included. SMS and WhatsApp depend on your plan.

1. Go to Email subscribers
2. Click Add Subscriber
3. Enter an email address, choose the status dashboard, and select the components they should hear about
4. Save

Admin-added subscribers are created already verified. You can also let visitors subscribe from the public status dashboard when subscriptions are enabled on that dashboard for at least one channel.

One subscriber is enough to complete this step.

Step 5: Publish an event

Any published event completes the checklist: incident, maintenance, or informational.

1. Go to Events
2. Click Create Event
3. On the General tab:
   • Select a type (Incident is a good first test)
   • Enter a clear Title (e.g. "Partial API Outage")
   • Choose the initial Status (e.g. "Investigating" — this comes from your workflow)
4. Switch to the Components tab, select the affected component(s), and assign a severity for each (e.g. "Degraded Performance"). Severity is auto-derived from the highest one.
5. On the Description tab, provide a rich-text explanation for viewers.
6. On the initial Status / timeline section, enter the Initial message that will appear as the first public timeline entry.
7. On the Publish tab, enable Publish so the event appears on your status dashboards.
8. Click Create Event.

The event is created, component status on the dashboard updates automatically, and (because it is published) the details are visible to subscribers and visitors.

What's next?

Once the five setup steps are done, you can: