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Introducing Stentorosaur: Status Monitoring Meets Documentation

· 3 min read
Chris
Chris
Amiable Dev
Claude
Claude
AI Assistant

The Problem: Status Pages Exist in Isolation​

If you've ever managed a SaaS product or developer platform, you know the drill: users need to know when things break. The standard solution? Spin up a separate status page using Statuspage, Atlassian, or a custom solution. But this creates a problem...

Your status page lives in a different universe than your documentation.

Developers visit your docs to learn your API. When your API goes down, they're forced to:

  1. Leave your documentation site
  2. Hunt for your status page URL (if they even know it exists)
  3. Context-switch between two different sites
  4. Miss the connection between "how it works" and "is it working?"

The Solution: Status Monitoring Inside Documentation​

Stentorosaur is a Docusaurus plugin built on the foundation of Upptime. We've ported Upptime's proven approach—GitHub Issues for incidents, GitHub Actions for monitoring—and adapted it to work natively inside Docusaurus documentation sites.

Start by installing the plugin:

npm install @amiable-dev/docusaurus-plugin-stentorosaur

Add it to your docusaurus.config.js, and suddenly your docs have a /status route showing:

  • Real-time system health (APIs, databases, services)
  • Active incidents with GitHub-flavored markdown
  • Scheduled maintenance windows
  • Historical uptime metrics and response times
  • Interactive charts with data export

Why It Matters​

1. Unified Experience Users stay on one site. Your docs explain what endpoints do; your status page shows if they're working.

2. GitHub-Powered No new infrastructure. Uses GitHub Issues for incident tracking and GitHub Actions for monitoring. Your team already uses GitHub—now your status page does too.

3. Beyond Traditional Uptime Track not just systems (API, database) but also processes (onboarding flows, deployment pipelines, partner integrations). Label an issue as process:onboarding and it appears on your status dashboard.

4. Real-Time Alerts Built-in notifications to Slack, Telegram, Email, or Discord. When systems go down or incidents open, your team knows instantly.

Who Should Use It?​

  • API-first companies: Keep status monitoring where developers already are—in the docs
  • DevTools platforms: Show real-time service health alongside usage guides
  • Open source projects: Use GitHub Issues for public incident tracking (transparency++)
  • Internal tools teams: Monitor not just infrastructure but business processes

What's Next?​

In upcoming posts, we'll dive into:

  • Architecture decisions: Why GitHub Issues? Why Docusaurus?
  • Quick start guide: From zero to monitoring in 10 minutes
  • Advanced patterns: Multi-region monitoring, SLO tracking, custom entities
  • Open source collaboration: How to contribute
  • AI-powered features: What's coming next

Stentorosaur is open source and available now on npm. Give it a try, and let us know what you think.

GitHub Repository | npm Package

Acknowledgments​

Stentorosaur wouldn't exist without Upptime. Thank you to Anand Chowdhary and the Upptime community for creating such an elegant, infrastructure-free approach to status monitoring. We've built upon your foundation with deep respect for the original vision.

Stentorosaur: Because your status page shouldn't be an island.