Monday Update: Customer Survey, Telegram Integration, Atlassian & Slack, Browser Extensions, and SSL

Our final Monday update of July and although many of our customers are heading off on summer vacation not only are we here monitoring your websites 24/7, but we’ve got some exciting new features and improvements happening over the holiday break.

StatusCake Customer Survey – July 2018

We sent out our customer survey at the tail end of last week.  If you’ve not seen the email in your in-box you can complete the survey here.  The customer survey is incredibly important to us as it enables us to understand how we are doing in key areas of the service, for instance in terms of our customer support and the product itself, but it’s also your opportunity to tell us how you think we can make improvements, and what direction we should take the product in.

Please do reply.  The feedback we’ve already had is invaluable – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and we do reply to every single survey response so don’t forget to leave your username or email address so that we can respond to you.  It also means that you’ll be entered into our prize draw to win one of two Amazon gift cards.

The survey will be closed at midnight on Friday 10th August so there’s still plenty of time to have your say.  We will be sharing all the results of the customer survey with you by the end of August, as well as setting out how we plan to implement some of the features and changes that have been driven by your feedback.

Atlassian & Slack Form Alliance, HipChat & Stride To Go &  New StatusCake Integration With Telegram

Last week saw a big announcement that Atlassian was selling two of its products HipChat and Stride to messaging behemoth Slack, as well as entering into a key strategic alliance with Slack and investing in the company.

Many will know Atlassian for its popular tools such as Jira, and Bitbucket as well as products such as Trello and StatusPage.io; the latter of which StatusCake has recently sought to challenge with its StatusPage.io alternative – StatusCake Pages.  Many of our existing customers have already made the transition from StatusPage.io as our very own StatusCake Pages not only integrates seamlessly with your StatusCake account but offers better value for money.

Although HipChat and Stride will be shut down by Atlassian there are many other integrations that our customers can use, including of course Slack itself and Microsoft teams.  We will also continue to look at new integrations, including Telegram that will be rolled out to our customers later this week.

Chrome Browser Extension

We’ve made some improvements to our StatusCake Alerts Chrome browser extension.  The Chrome extension is a great way of getting alerts on your uptime tests directly to your browser.  We’d love your feedback and thoughts on how to make this even more useful.  To add the extension to your browser just visit this page in the Chrome store.

Google Chrome SSL changes

The popular Chrome browser from Google has in a recent update begun to mark all sites accessed via HTTP:// and not HTTPS:// as insecure.

This means that for any sites only serving over http exclusively, or missing a redirect to the https – users will be strongly dissuaded from browsing the site and entering personal information.

If you want to check your StatusCake account right now for any offending URLs just follow the easy 2 step process below:

1 – First off use the filters in the main app dashboard to search for any URL’s that match “http://”

2 – Once that’s done simply scroll down the Status Codes for the tests, you are looking for any status code which does not begin with a 3, any that fit this criteria are likely to not have a redirect implemented, and should be checked out.

In response to these coming changes we recently implemented SSL access for both our Public Reporting and StatusCake Pages, so you won’t have to worry about users receiving any warnings when accessing these reports.