Status Alert Pages with Email & SMS Notifications in Laravel

About the project

When an online service slows down or goes offline, the people who rely on it want to know three things quickly: is something wrong, is someone working on it, and when is it fixed. We built status alert pages in Laravel that answer those questions publicly, and send the same updates straight to subscribers by email and SMS, so nobody has to keep refreshing a page to find out what is happening.

The brief

• One public page showing the live status of each service, instead of updates scattered across emails and support replies
• A simple way for the team to post an incident and keep it updated while they work on it
• Alerts that reach people who aren’t watching the page, by email and by SMS text message
• Subscriptions that people sign up for themselves and can leave at any time

What we delivered

• Status pages: the current state of each service or component at a glance, such as operational, degraded performance, partial outage or major outage
• Incidents with a timeline: every incident is posted with timestamped updates as it moves from investigating to identified, monitoring and resolved
• Email notifications: subscribers are emailed automatically when an incident is opened, updated and resolved
• SMS notifications: the same alerts sent as short text messages, for people who need to know right away
• Self-service subscriptions: visitors subscribe with an email address or mobile number, confirm it, and can unsubscribe from any message
• Admin dashboard: the team updates statuses and posts incidents from one screen, and subscribers are notified without any extra steps
• Incident history: past incidents stay on record, so customers can see how issues were handled

How we built it

Notifications that don’t hold anything up

Email and SMS alerts are built on Laravel’s notification system, with one notification sent over two channels, so an incident update is written once and delivered both ways. Sending runs in background queues rather than while the admin waits, so posting an update stays instant however many subscribers there are, and a message that fails to send can be retried instead of being lost.

Subscriptions people trust

Every email address and phone number is confirmed before it receives alerts, which keeps the subscriber list clean and makes sure people only get messages they asked for. Each alert includes a way to unsubscribe.

Clear on any screen

The status pages are built with responsive Blade templates, because people usually check status on a phone, often in the middle of a problem. Colors and plain-language labels make the state of each service obvious at a glance.

Technologies

• Back end: Laravel (PHP), using Laravel Notifications for the email and SMS channels, with queued jobs for sending
• Front end: Laravel Blade templates with responsive layouts
• Database: MySQL
• Messaging: email delivery plus an SMS gateway API for text messages

Need a status page, alerting or notification system built in Laravel? See our back-end development services, or get in touch.