Network Monitoring Tools: How To Calculate Server Uptime - mersano/Article GitHub Wiki

Server downtime can cost you millions of dollars in losses depending on the size of your business. According to a report by Gartner, server downtime can cost $5600 per minute on average. But this could be more. At the low end, the downtime can cost about $140,000 per hour and $300,000 per hour on average. At the higher end, it could get as much as $540,000 per hour or more.

In May 2017, a server downtime forced British Airways to cancel flights for more than 75,000 passengers and reimbursed about $68 million, excluding the cost of hotel lodging for passengers. As if that was not enough, the company was confronted with a shocking 2.8% dip in the stock price of the parent company, IAG. The public relation disaster that arose from this server downtime incident is enough to force a company to go bankrupt. Fortunately, British Airways and the parent company- IAG is big enough to weather the storm. Your own company may not be so lucky. Even 2 minutes server downtime is enough to wreak havoc on your business.

Server downtime is bad for business. You have to keep an eye on it 24/7 or outsource it to a professional company. Server downtime simply means that your server is not operational. There are millions of reasons why your server can experience downtime. Thus, it is always important to take proactive steps to either stop it from happening or minimize the impact. One of the ways to do this is to choose a company that can provide 100% uptime. In the real world, most providers will only promise 99.999% uptime which is as good as 100% uptime (depending on your needs). Perhaps, taking a look at how server uptime is calculated will give you an insight into the reason for this.

 

A typical calculation for server uptime is given as follows:

• (Time in a given period - Downtime)/ Time in a given period

Let's say that in a 30-day month, you only experienced server downtime 30 minutes in that month. Your calculation will look as follows:

(43,200 minutes - 30 minutes)/ 43,200 minutes = 99.93%

Thus, your server uptime for the month is 99.93%.

Most top cloud service providers offer different options for server uptime. Let's say your provider guarantees a 99% uptime over a period of one year. This typically means that you could experience up to 3.65 days of downtime in the year. Split into months, you can get 7.2 hours downtime each month on that particular server. Unfortunately, some businesses are too critical that even a 7.2 hours downtime can mean massive losses. In that case, there are other options.

In the tech world, 99% uptime is usually referred to as "two nines". This is because we also have five nines (99.999), six nines (99.9999) and so on. With 99.999% uptime guarantee, you can bring your server downtime down to just 5 minutes per year or a mere 26 seconds per month. Unfortunately, this will cost you more. In fact, as the "nines" increase, so does your cost. But on the bright side, you can ensure a minimal level of server downtime by choosing more nines.

With different options to choose from, it makes sense to choose a server based on the need of your application only. Take the British Airways for example or a website where customers book flights, talk to other pilots and stuffs like that, it makes more sense to go for the highest uptime guarantee available as any sort of downtime will cost the business a lot of inconveniences as well as losses. If your business will lose one million dollars or you will run into a huge public relations disaster as in the case of British Airways, then you'd have a business case for higher server uptime availability.

On the other hand, if you have an application where people go to watch cute cat pictures or something of that nature, choosing higher availability server may not make much sense as you won't be able to recover your cost. Your goal should be to choose a provider that can guarantee an acceptable level of service within your budget. In most cases, the nature of the application you want to host on the server will determine the type of server you will need.

In recent years, top brands are using network monitoring tools such as Pingdom to check server uptime and to keep an eye on their server. With a network monitoring tool, you will get an alert immediately your server goes offline so you can take action immediately before it becomes critical.

• Monitor your website from almost everywhere
• See systems that are about to crash and fix them before they turn into a downtime
• Get alerts when your server goes offline
• Monitor your bandwidth usage and saturation
• Get notified of site availability issues
• Keep on eye on activity spikes, low disk space, as well as memory usage
• See your historical data

Server downtime is almost unavoidable. However, Pingdom lets you check server uptime and keep an eye on it so you can notice problems even before they occur. This lets you save time and cost in dealing with server downtime. With the right network monitoring tool, you can run your business without worrying too much about your server going offline.