Competlab Status Watch

Status & Reliability Intelligence

You probe each monitored competitor's public status page, extract current incidents + recent 90-day incident history, and report findings as decision-grade competitive intelligence.

Workflow

Step 1: Identify competitors

Pull list_projects + list_competitors.

Step 2: Probe candidate status URLs

For each competitor, try in order:

1. Statuspage.io schema at status.{domain}/api/v2/status.json and /api/v2/incidents.json — structured JSON, fastest signal
2. Better Stack hosted status at status.{domain} — HTML extraction
3. Instatus at {domain}.instatus.com — newer Statuspage.io alternative
4. incident.io — used by some vendors (e.g., Block/Square at issquareup.com)
5. Sorry™ — Pingdom + Replit pattern
6. RSS / ATOM feeds at paypal-status.com style
7. SPA Playwright-rendered status (Stripe, Adyen, Razorpay) — note as "requires browser rendering"
8. SAML/auth-gated — flag when canonical status.{vendor}.com returns 401/403

Use Bash + curl with --max-time 8 -A "<Chrome UA>".

Step 3: For Statuspage.io schema vendors, extract structured data

curl -sS https://status.{domain}/api/v2/incidents.json | jq '.incidents[0:5] | .[] | {name, status, severity: .impact, created_at, resolved_at, components: .components}'

Step 4: For HTML status pages, VERIFY content before trusting HTTP 200

Critical anti-pattern (banked from real-world validation): /status returning HTTP 200 + HTML body does NOT prove a status page exists. Common false-positives:

• Site has SPA-catchall route → /status returns homepage HTML
• Site has locale-based redirect → /status 200s but redirects to /en/ or /de/

Verification gate: for any HTML 200 response on a status-page URL, use mcp__competlab__fetch_url with cleanHtml:true and verify ONE of:

• HTML <title> contains "status" / "uptime" / "incident" (case-insensitive)
• Body contains canonical incident-page schema markers (incident-list, component-status, current-status-indicator, statuspage- prefix, etc.)
• finalUrl after redirect still contains /status path (not redirected to homepage)

If NONE of these markers present → mark as SPA-catchall / no-status-page (not a real status page).

Example failure modes from a real-world validation run:

• Vendor A /status → 200 + HTML, but finalUrl redirected to /en/ (locale-redirect false-positive — multilingual site geo-redirects to default locale)
• Vendor B /status → 200 + HTML, but body was homepage content (SPA-catchall false-positive — single-page-app catch-all route serves homepage at any unmapped path)

Read recent incident list from cleaned HTML only AFTER verification gate passes. Extract: incident titles, dates, severity, resolution time.

Step 5: Synthesize per-competitor + cross-competitor

Per competitor:

• Status page exists? URL? Backend type (Statuspage.io / Sorry / custom / broken / missing)
• Current state (operational / degraded / partial outage / major outage)
• Recent 90-day incidents (count, total duration, severity mix)
• Notable recent incidents (sales-ammunition-grade — name, date, duration, impact)
• Operational maturity signal (status-page-missing OR -broken is itself a CMO-grade narrative liability)

Cross-competitor:

• Coverage breakdown (X of N vendors have public status page; Y of N use Statuspage.io)
• Reliability comparison (incident frequency, total downtime, MTTR signal)
• Operational-hygiene gaps (vendors with broken or missing status pages)

Output Structure

# Status & Reliability — [Category / Project]
> Generated [date] | X of N vendors have functional public status page

## Summary
[Coverage breakdown, top sales-ammunition findings]

## Per-competitor
### [Competitor]
- **Status page:** [URL + backend type] / [BROKEN/MISSING — signal]
- **Current:** [operational / degraded / outage]
- **Recent 90d:** [N incidents, total duration]
- **Notable:** [sales-ammunition list with dates + durations + impact]

## Cross-competitor patterns
[Coverage gap, reliability comparison, hygiene gaps]

## Sales ammunition ready-to-use
[1-3 concrete data points naming a specific dated incident, duration, and customer-facing impact]

Decision Questions

1. "Do we want to reference competitor incidents in sales conversations or keep marketing-neutral?" — affects whether to surface sales ammo
2. "Is our own status page functional + Statuspage.io-formatted?" — surfaces self-hygiene gap as recommendation if not

Error Handling

• Status page returns 404 / domain doesn't exist: record vendor as "no public status page" — that IS the finding (transparency gap as customer-facing signal). Don't infer reliability either direction.
• Statuspage.io API 5xx / fetch_url timeout: retry once with 10s delay; if persistent, mark "status page detected but data unavailable" rather than dropping the vendor silently.
• HTML content verification gate fails (SPA-catchall / locale-redirect / 200-but-empty-shell): treat as "status page detected, content not parseable" — DON'T claim incident data from an unparsed page. This catches the common SPA + i18n trap where vendor's status URL returns HTTP 200 but actual page content is gated behind hydration.

What NOT To Do

• Don't fabricate incident data — if status page is missing, say so.
• Don't include private/internal status URLs — only public.
• Don't over-state reliability claims for vendors with broken status pages (could be deliberately gated, not necessarily unreliable).