External status polling — third-party dependencies

Most apps depend on third parties — Stripe for payments, AWS or GCP for infrastructure, Twilio for SMS. When their status pages light up red, your customers want to see it on yours too. External Status Polling watches those upstream pages and reflects them as components on your dashboard.

To add an external dependency:
1. Status → Components → "+ Add External"
2. Pick from the catalog: AWS, GCP, Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, GitHub, Cloudflare, Auth0, etc.
3. Pick the specific service area (e.g. AWS → us-east-1 → EC2)
4. Set how it's labeled on your status page (e.g. "Payment Processing (Stripe)" instead of just "Stripe")
5. Save

How polling works:
• A 5-minute cron (pollExternalStatus) hits each provider's official status JSON
• If their service is degraded or down, your component reflects it
• Customer sees: "Payment Processing (Stripe) — Major Outage" with the upstream incident summary linked
• When upstream resolves, your component flips back to Operational automatically

Why this matters:
• Customers stop opening tickets ("hey is your stuff down?" — when it's Stripe's fault)
• Your support team doesn't have to play upstream-detective during customer outages
• Your postmortems can reference the upstream incident rather than guess

What it does NOT do:
• Trigger a full incident on your status page — that's still manual (you decide if your customers are affected)
• Send subscriber emails for upstream-only events (would be too noisy)
• Speak for the upstream — it just reflects their public status

Custom external monitors:
• Don't see your provider in the catalog? Add a custom HTTP poller via Components → "+ Add Custom Poll" — paste a URL that returns 200 = healthy, anything else = degraded