I deployed a status board once. I was forced by the higher ups to take it down. Something about it sending the wrong message to our clients. Sending out emails once an hour with status updates was way more productive.
I have the "internal status dashboard" (read: "notifications of individual instance or app downtime") for us, and the "external status dashboard" (which is the app status from the front of the load balancer) for the higher ups to show to customers.
Our network monitoring software has a dashboard we use internally. Our external monitor was a Google Apps project that was manually updated. Never got far enough into it to automate it, yet.
