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Downdetector Data Connector

The BigPanda Unified Data Connector (UDC) syncs real-time outage status and user report data from Downdetector for upstream services that may impact service availability. The connector uses the Downdetector API to retrieve up to date information for a configured list of companies and services.

The Downdetector data connector does not perform incremental loading. Each run is a fresh point-in-time snapshot. The Downdetector data connector should not be relied upon for historical backfill.

For each issue, the Downdetector Data Connector imports the following data:

  • Current status: success, warning, or danger

  • 24-hour user report statistics (96 × 15-minute intervals)

  • Regional heatmap data (reports by city/region)

  • Network provider breakdown (reports by ISP)

  • Problem indicators (for example, login issues, streaming outages)

  • Recent user comments

Authentication

The Downdetector data connector uses a Downdetector bearer token (JWT), stored in AWS Secrets Manager.

Sync preferences

Provide the following information about your sync preferences to BigPanda:

Required Configuration 

Option

Description

Companies

List of companies to monitor, identified by slug and countries. See the Downdetector API documentation for the slugs for available services, and country options.

Selected Subregions

(Optional, per-company) A list of subregion codes (for example, CA, NY, or US-CA) that restricts regional heatmap output to those subregions only. If omitted, the connector continues to return regional heatmap data for all available subregions of the configured countries. See the Downdetector API documentation for valid subregion codes.

Delay Between Companies (MS)

Rate-limiting delay between API calls (default: 500ms)

Request Timeout

HTTP request timeout (default: 60s)

Time Window Hours

Time window for detailed data (default: 20 min)

Subregions

When selectedSubregions is configured for a company, the connector still collects the regional heatmap needed to apply the subregion filter, even on otherwise-successful checks where unrelated detail data is skipped. Only heatmap regions matching the configured subregions are retained in the output.

In the incident information while selectedSubregions is configured for a company:

  • regional_heatmap, affected_regions, regional_metrics, and any named regional fields contain only the configured subregions.

  • The payload includes a new selected_subregions field that lists the configured subregion codes, so downstream consumers can confirm the scope that produced the regional output.

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