Internal status pages: A guide for IT teams

An internal status page solves this by giving your entire team real-time visibility into what's actually happening with the systems an entire workforce depends on.

In this guide, we review the core purpose of internal status pages, when your team needs one, best practices for maintaining it, and how to set one up quickly using Sorry™.

What is an internal status page?

An internal status page (also called a private status page) is a private dashboard that shows your team the status of internal systems. Think of it as the behind-the-scenes view of key applications and services you rely on at work. These might be third-party applications or proprietary systems, servers, or databases.

While your external status page tells customers about issues with your public-facing products and APIs, your internal status page tells your employees about the internal systems and services that keep your company running.

Internal status page vs. external status page

The key difference comes down to who you're communicating with and what you're communicating about.

Internal status pages

Internal status pages are accessible only to your company or specific teams. They show the current status of systems your employees rely on to do their work, whether that's your CRM, ERP system, collaboration tools, or network infrastructure.

Who uses them: IT teams use internal status pages to communicate infrastructure issues to the rest of the company. Employees check the page when systems feel slow or broken, eliminating the need to ping IT with 'Is the CRM down?' questions.

External status pages

Public status pages are accessible by anyone with your URL. They show the high-level status of the products and services your customers use: your app, API, payment processing, and specific features such as "notifications" or "mobile app".

Who uses them: Customer support and product teams use public status pages to reduce support load during incidents. Sales, marketing, and customer success can also use them to build trust and demonstrate reliability. Customers subscribe to get proactive notifications about issues that might affect them.

Below is a simple breakdown of the difference between internal and external status pages.

Benefits of an internal status page

When workplace systems go down, the secondary problem is often worse than the primary one. Yes, your company email is unavailable, but now you've also got hundreds or thousands of employees asking about it in Slack instead of focusing on other work.

IT is scrambling to answer questions rather than resolve the issue, and departments are making decisions based on incomplete or conflicting information. Employees are stuck in a chaotic limbo, and it's a massive waste of productivity across the entire organization.

A private status page fixes these issues. Here's how.

Reduced IT support load during incidents

When critical workplace systems go down, employees can check the status page instead of flooding IT with tickets and Slack messages. Your IT team can focus on more meaningful work instead of answering "when will it be back up?" 50 times.

Here's the math: If 100 employees each spend 2 minutes asking IT about an outage, that's 200 employee-minutes wasted plus 200 IT-minutes spent responding. That's 400 minutes lost.

A single update to a status page shaves that down to 30 seconds of reading a status update, helping everyone save time. And the time saved compounds with every incident.

Single source of truth for system status

Everyone from sales to finance to operations checks the same page to see what's happening. No more inconsistent information spreading through different Slack channels or email threads.

When teams hear different timelines or explanations, they end up making conflicting decisions. For example, sales might continue scheduling demos on a system that the product team already knows will be down for scheduled maintenance. A status page keeps everyone working from the same information.

Proactive communication about planned maintenance

With an internal status page, you can create a single scheduled maintenance announcement that automatically notifies (and reminds) impacted teams. Everyone knows when the systems they rely on will be unavailable for updates.

The alternative is scrambling to notify teams via email, reminding them closer to the maintenance window, or hoping they see the Slack announcement. With a status page, you schedule it once, set up notifications, and reminders are automatically sent at the right time. It's less work for IT, and fewer surprises for employees.

Better incident coordination across teams and time zones

When you have 25+ IT team members managing systems across multiple time zones, the status page plays a critical role in the handoff between shifts. When the night shift identifies a brewing issue with the ERP system, the morning team can see exactly what they've attempted and where the incident currently stands.

This becomes especially valuable for complex, multi-day incidents. Instead of relying on handoff meetings or scattered ticket notes, your entire team can see the incident timeline.

Historical data for infrastructure decisions

Status pages help piece together the post-incident review and serve as a system of record for identifying issues over time. You can use that data in vendor discussions ("M365 had 12 outages last quarter") or to prioritize infrastructure improvements.

This shifts your team from reactive firefighting to strategic planning. When you can show leaders that a particular system causes twice as many incidents as everything else combined, you've got the data to justify budget for upgrades or vendor changes.

When your team needs an internal status page

Internal status pages aren't for every company. They're primarily used by people who manage critical workplace systems that the entire company relies on. Here are some signals that it might be time for an internal status page at your company.

• You manage multiple critical workplace systems: If employees depend on SAP, M365, your network, phone systems, and collaboration tools, you need a centralized status communication tool.
• Employees learn about outages by trying (and failing) to use systems: When people discover the network is down by losing their VPN connection rather than seeing a heads-up, your organization is in a reactive state rather than a proactive one.
• IT is flooded with "Is X down?" questions during an outage: When your CRM goes down, and 50 people are asking IT if Salesforce is broken, you need a status page.
• Planned maintenance creates confusion across departments: When finance doesn't know the ERP will be down at the end of the month for a maintenance window, or if the sales team doesn't know that CRM maintenance is scheduled during a big campaign launch, you need a dedicated way to communicate maintenance.
• Outages cause distraction and chaos: If Slack explodes with a stream of chatter about a system being unavailable, and no answers are available, you need a single source of truth.

How to quickly set up an internal status page with Sorry™

Sorry™ offers a straightforward way to create a private status page that your entire company can reference during outages and planned maintenance. Here's how to get started.

Step 1: Define which components to include

Start by mapping which products and services you want to include on your status page. We (and most other status page tools) call these components. Your components on a private page might be:

• Core workplace systems your entire company uses (M365, Google Workspace, Slack, Salesforce, SAP)
• Department-specific tools (marketing automation, analytics platforms, ERP systems)
• Location-specific services if you have multiple offices (office network, 3rd floor printer)

Don't overthink this step. You can always add or remove components later. We recommend starting with 5-10 systems that cause the most chaos when they go down.

Step 2: Create your status page

If you're new to Sorry™, you'll need to sign up for a trial account. If you're an existing Sorry™ customer, you can create a 2nd page that will become your internal private status page.

Add your workplace systems as components. Instead of technical names like "auth-service-prod," use names your employees will recognize and understand: "Salesforce CRM," "Microsoft 365," "Company Network."

Sorry™ lets you group similar components into a nested parent component for better organization. For example, you might create a "Collaboration Tools" component that includes child components for email, Slack, and video conferencing systems. Or you might group components by location if you manage IT for multiple offices.

Step 3: Invite other status page admins

Good incident communication requires a team. Invite your teammates who will share the responsibility of managing the status page: posting notices during incidents, announcing scheduled maintenance events, adding/removing components, and managing access and notifications.

But don't stop there. You need to train them so they're prepared. Walk through mock incidents to give them hands-on experience before production incidents occur.

Step 4: Set up authentication

This is what makes your status page truly internal. Sorry™ supports several OAuth authentication options: Slack OAuth, Google OAuth, and Microsoft OAuth.

Once you set this up, your employees can seamlessly access your private status page with their existing login credentials.

Step 5: Share it with your company and encourage them to subscribe

A status page is useless if no one knows about it. Just as you need to promote your external status page to your customers, you also need to announce the launch of your internal status page to your employees.

A single announcement isn't enough; people learn through repetition. Have your leadership team announce the new status page at company all-hands meetings and in other company communications. Add links where employees already spend time (Slack, wikis, etc).

Tips for using internal status pages

Good incident communication takes planning and practice. Here are some tips for success.

• Keep it updated: Stale data is worse than no communication at all. If your status page shows "all systems operational" while employees are locked out of Salesforce, you've just taught them not to trust your status page. Update it immediately when something breaks, even if you don't have all of the details yet. Share regular updates throughout the incident, especially for critical issues.
• Make it easy to access: Pin the link to your internal status page in Slack or Teams. Add it to your IT wiki. Include it in new employee onboarding. Make checking the status page muscle memory for your organization. It should be the first place people look when something feels off.
• Use employee-friendly language: Your audience is the entire company, not just technical folks. "Email is down, we're working on it" is better than "Exchange server experiencing degraded IMAP performance." Save the technical details for your post-incident reviews.
• Schedule maintenance events proactively: Don't post planned downtime the day before it's happening. Give people at least two weeks' notice. This lets them plan around it so it's less of a disruption.
• Review your components list monthly: Your workplace systems change. You add new tools, sunset old ones, and reorganize departments. All of those changes can lead to an out-of-date component list. Review them regularly to ensure the status page is providing as much value as possible.

Stop the IT scramble. Get an internal status page.

When you work in IT, the rest of the company's employees are your customers. An internal status page gives them instant visibility into what's broken, what's being fixed, and when they can get back to work.

You don't leave your customers in the dark, and you shouldn't leave your employees in the dark either.

It takes about 30 minutes or less to create an internal status page using Sorry™. Create your page today, add your workplace systems, and give your team the visibility they've been asking for. Start your free trial or schedule a demo to see how Sorry™ handles internal status communication.