Keeping track of your server uptime reporting may not be as important as it used to be, but it is still a valuable indicator when used accurately.
However, there is another metric that will give you a more precise picture of the health of your network and overall downtime. And understanding the difference between the two is essential when navigating providers.
Uptime Vs Availability & Why You Need to Know the Difference
Odds are, if you employ one of the hosting services available for your network, you will have heard of both uptime reporting and availability. Often people get these two confused or mistakenly think they are the same BUT the reality is they are two very different indicators of the health of your provider’s service.
Uptime = Online & Active
Uptime is thought to be the calculated time that your network or website is online and available to you and your clients. However, it actually refers to the time that your allocated server is active, powered on, and accessible to your system administrators.
It may be that the service is up but not necessarily available to your applications. If this is the case, essentially your business is not functioning as it should without the access that you need, but it still counts as uptime.
So, server uptime reporting by itself doesn’t reflect the entire picture.
Availability Defines Productive/Accessible Server UpTime
Availability statistics give you a more holistic and accurate view of your network because they represent the amount of time that your server(s) is accessible AND that all associated applications and services can be used.
For instance, a company may have 100% live uptime because their server is operating, however, if the services on the server are not operational and not accessible, the uptime maybe 100% but the actual availability is 0%.
Ensure Your Supplier Service-level Agreements (SLA) Cover You for Downtime Metrics
The SLA metrics that fit your business are defined by the services agreed upon with your provider. Keep it as simple as possible and minimise your costs.
Determine the essential elements of your operation, and to ensure that your service delivers optimal benefits, and choose easy metric data collection (automated is ideal) to avoid potentially costly downtime. Metrics that you may include:
- Availability of service: generally measured using predetermined time slots.
- Defect rates: the percentage or counts of faults in significant deliverables. This can include coding errors, inadequate backups and restores, and deadlines that are missed.
- Network security: breaches can cost your company in productivity and monetary costs. If you closely manage updates and patches it’s likely that incidents will be managed swiftly.
- Technical quality control: commercial analysis tools need to be engaged to measure the quality of application development that is outsourced.
- Business outcomes: you can join an increasing trend for companies to include business process metrics as KPI’s given that they can easily be measured.
A Few Last Words
It’s worth including uptime reporting on any SLA that you hold with service providers, but it is even more important to keep a track of the server availability. Your SLA ideally will commit to a high but realistic availability time because downtime costs money and needs to be minimized.
