Many sites have internal status pages of one kind or another. And when there’s a problem, that’s often the first place people have to check out what’s going on. The status plugin helps us keep that information in-line within our chat client. You can avoid the «repeating what the computer said» effect on phone bridges, Google Hangouts or whatever it may be during an incident or outage. It also keeps a convenient log for postmortem review. (Note, this plugin is not yet open-sourced, but will be shortly.)
Implementing these plugins (and many more) at PagerDuty has really helped us as we’ve scaled our team and infrastructure over the last year. We value things that help make engineers more productive, and want to be able to share those things with other engineers and businesses. Because of that idea, we work to open source many of the things we build internally.