Frequently Asked Questions
How does SaaS Down Radar fetch status data?
SaaS Down Radar fetches real-time status data directly from each service's official public status page. Most major SaaS providers publish their operational status through standardized APIs, particularly the Atlassian Statuspage platform — the system used by GitHub, Slack, Stripe, Cloudflare, and dozens of others. We query these APIs every five minutes to retrieve current component-level status for each monitored service. Because we read directly from official sources, the status information you see reflects exactly what the vendor is reporting — no third-party estimation, no crowd-sourcing, and no guesswork. For services that do not use the Atlassian platform, we integrate with their native public APIs wherever available.
How often is status data updated?
Status data is refreshed automatically every five minutes. You can see exactly how long until the next refresh by checking the countdown timer in the top navigation bar — it counts down from 5:00 and resets after each refresh cycle. Each individual service card also displays a "last checked" timestamp so you always know precisely how recent the data is. When a refresh is actively in progress, a "Refreshing..." indicator appears in the header. This five-minute interval balances the need for timely information against the rate limits imposed by various status page APIs. During active incidents, major services typically update their status pages every few minutes anyway, so the five-minute polling interval ensures you receive updates very close to when they are published.
What is the difference between "Degraded Performance" and a full outage?
This is one of the most important distinctions on the dashboard. Degraded performance (shown in yellow) means the service is still running and accessible, but it is experiencing problems that affect quality — slow response times, intermittent API errors, delayed notifications, or reduced functionality in specific features. For example, Slack might deliver messages with a multi-minute delay, or GitHub might show intermittent 500 errors on pull request pages. A partial outage (orange) is more severe: one or more significant components of the service are fully unavailable for some or all users. A major outage (red) means the service itself is broadly down or inaccessible. Understanding these distinctions helps teams make smarter decisions — during degraded performance you might continue working with patience, while a major outage warrants immediately invoking backup communication channels or pausing deployments that depend on the affected service.
Which services does SaaS Down Radar monitor?
We currently monitor more than 20 major SaaS platforms across six categories. Developer Tools include GitHub (code hosting and CI/CD), Vercel (frontend deployment), Netlify (static hosting and functions), and npm (package registry). Cloud Infrastructure covers AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare (CDN and security). Communication platforms include Slack, Discord, and Zoom. AI Services currently covers OpenAI, the provider behind ChatGPT and the widely used GPT-4 API. Productivity and Design includes Notion, Figma, and Linear. Payments and Monitoring covers Stripe (payment processing), Datadog (infrastructure monitoring), and Twilio (messaging and communications APIs). We regularly evaluate and add new services based on community requests, prioritizing tools with broad adoption and publicly available status APIs.
How can I get notified of outages?
The most straightforward approach is to bookmark SaaS Down Radar and keep it open in a browser tab during your working hours. The dashboard auto-refreshes every five minutes without any user interaction, and when any monitored service enters a degraded or outage state, a prominent outage notification banner appears at the top of the page with details about which services are affected. This banner is implemented with ARIA live region support, making it accessible to screen reader users as well. For teams that want a more proactive monitoring setup, we recommend integrating SaaS Down Radar into your incident response runbook — when your alerting system fires, the first manual check should be whether the affected service is already reporting an incident. This can dramatically reduce the time engineers spend investigating issues that are actually caused by vendor outages rather than internal code problems.
How do I request adding a new service?
Send an email to taeshinkim11@gmail.com with the service name and a link to its public status page. We review all requests and prioritize services that meet two criteria: significant user adoption in professional or developer contexts, and a publicly accessible status API. Most major SaaS providers that use the Atlassian Statuspage platform can be added quickly since we already have integration infrastructure for that format. For services that use custom status page implementations, integration takes a bit more development effort. We aim to respond to all service requests within one week and will let you know whether and when the service is added. There is no charge for requesting a service — SaaS Down Radar will always remain free, and we expand our coverage based on what the community needs most.
What does the incident history section show?
The incident history feed, located below the main service grid on the dashboard, aggregates recent incidents across all monitored services into a unified chronological timeline. Each incident entry shows the name of the affected service, a title or brief description of the incident, the severity level (minor, major, or critical), the start time of the incident, the current resolution status (investigating, identified, monitoring, or resolved), and a direct link to the official incident report on the service's own status page. This unified view is particularly valuable for teams conducting post-incident reviews, as it lets you quickly reconstruct what was happening across your entire SaaS stack at any given time. It also helps infrastructure teams assess the historical reliability of services they are evaluating for adoption, giving a factual baseline beyond what vendors publish in their SLA marketing materials.
Is SaaS Down Radar compatible with mobile devices?
Yes, SaaS Down Radar is fully responsive and designed to work well on smartphones, tablets, and desktop displays of all sizes. The service status grid adapts from a four-column layout on large desktop screens to two columns on tablets and a single column on phones, ensuring all service cards remain readable and tappable at any screen size. The search bar, category filter buttons, incident history feed, and all other dashboard features function identically on mobile. The navigation collapses gracefully on smaller screens, and share buttons for social networks are accessible in the footer on mobile. Performance is optimized for mobile networks as well — the entire dashboard loads from a minimal static bundle with no heavy frameworks, keeping load times fast even on slower connections.
Why does a service sometimes show "Unknown" status?
A service may show "Unknown" status (displayed in gray) when SaaS Down Radar was unable to retrieve a valid response from that service's status API during the most recent check. This can happen for several reasons: temporary network issues between our system and the status page API, rate limiting by the status page provider, or a temporary unavailability of the status page itself. Importantly, an Unknown status does not necessarily mean the service is down — it means we simply could not confirm its status during the last polling interval. The status will automatically update on the next refresh cycle (within five minutes). If a service consistently shows Unknown, please let us know at taeshinkim11@gmail.com and we will investigate the API integration.