Glossary
Vendor-Reported Status
What a provider says about itself - one record among several, not the ground truth.
Definition
Vendor-reported status is the state a provider publishes about its own services - the status page, the @-account, the email. It is authored by the party whose reliability is in question, scoped to incidents it chooses to declare, and updated on its own schedule.
The problem
“The status page says operational” is routinely treated as a measurement. It is a statement: often honest, occasionally delayed, structurally unable to describe what the vendor is not looking at.
Why it matters
During an incident, the gap between “not yet declared” and “not happening” is exactly where customer-side decisions live: fail over now or keep waiting. Decisions need evidence with a timestamp, and vendor statements are one input, not the clock.
Practical example
A status site can be fully operational while the API it reports on degrades; conversely a measured status-site failure during a traffic spike is real information about the vendor’s edge, whatever the API is doing. Neither record substitutes for the other.
How RELIASTRA approaches it
RELIASTRA never ingests, mirrors or reconciles vendor-reported status into its figures - and publishes the two records side by side conceptually, so disagreement is readable rather than averaged away. Where a vendor’s status endpoint is itself the observed target, the record says so explicitly.
Add one dependency you already own.
RELIASTRA probes the external services your software relies on, confirms a fault deterministically, and keeps a record you can verify later. One plan, $9/month, and a 14-day trial that needs no card.