What is Uptime?

• Uptime definition

  Uptime definition

  Uptime is a measure of an application or website availability to its end users. Companies measure downtime using a simple formula:

  (total availability time of the website * 100)/total time = uptime percentage

  Most companies consider 99.999% as high availability, but the goal is reaching 100% to ensure a seamless experience.
• Why is website uptime monitoring important?

  Why is website uptime monitoring important?

  A website is one of the most important channels for digital-native companies. It helps to showcase the value proposition of products and services and acts as a lead magnet. Owing to the current COVID-19 pandemic, companies are expanding their digital footprints more aggressively and many companies leverage websites or mobile applications to reach out to customers. While building these digital products, it’s crucial to ensure the customers receive a seamless experience. Availability becomes quintessential to prevent customer churn.

  Managing a website or application can be daunting. It includes various components of IT infrastructure such as network, hardware, software, and other third-party services such as content delivery networks (CDN), authentication services, and web application firewalls.  If there are any issues in the IT infrastructure, it can result in downtime. During peak hours, such downtime can impact business and lead to revenue loss. By continuously monitoring the uptime of web applications, a business can proactively tackle problems contributing to downtime.

  Implementing an uptime monitoring strategy helps automate availability checks at frequent intervals and gain granular visibility into website uptime. Besides, uptime monitoring can help achieve the following benefits:

  • Downtime alerts: Most monitoring tools offer real-time alerting features, allowing companies to track website availability in real time. This enables them to prevent any revenue loss and ensure seamless customer experience. In long terms, downtime can also contribute to search rankings on the search engine result pages. With the help of timely alerts and notifications, it becomes easier for companies to allocate IT staff and resources for resolving downtime and restoring the website to normalcy before it turns into a crisis.
  • Demonstrate reliability: Business-critical applications or websites can publish historical uptime data to demonstrate the reliability of their websites and applications. This assures prospective customers and other stakeholders about the website availability. Uptime history is even more critical for companies investing in software products to ensure their mission critical business operations will work seamlessly and if there are any considerations they need to think through.
  • Maintain service levels: Enterprise customers often requisite service level guarantees from their SaaS vendors. This requires setting up service level agreements (SLAs) and adhering to them. In case of service level breaches, a customer could impose hefty penalties or pursue legal action depending on the agreed-upon SLAs and business value. By continuously monitoring uptime, businesses can forecast whether they’re on track to meet service levels and take mitigative measures to prevent SLA breaches.
  • Protect brand reputation: Apart from revenue loss, business reputation is severely hit with frequent outages and downtime. Proactive uptime monitoring along with monitoring the components of the entire IT ecosystem can keep the reputation intact and instilling trust in the brand.
• How to set up uptime monitoring

  How to set up uptime monitoring

  There are multiple factors that can impact the availability of an application or website. For example, websites or applications serving content using nearby nodes rely on a CDN to deliver content optimally to end users. Against this, a SaaS application may rely on multiple third-party integrations and services for several processes, including computing, storage, networking user authentication, malicious and traffic filtering, and more.

  Outlined below are some key aspects to monitor:

  • Monitor critical URLs: A website could have multiple URLs including pages covering news and events, products, careers, solutions, blogs, and more. For consumer-facing websites or applications, multiple URLs through the buying journey become critical. Businesses should identify vital website URLs that attract traffic, convert visitors, and provide valuable knowledge to customers. It’s important to list and monitor all critical URLs because while most pages remain available, specific pages may encounter a downtime. This could be due to technical errors on that specific page. Companies can ensure a consistent end-user experience by monitoring all critical URLs.
  • Web server monitoring: Companies may use one or more web servers to handle traffic spikes and reduce response time. This is also to ensure a right failover mechanism is in place. When one of the web servers is unavailable, it might only impact the end users of a specific segment or region. Businesses can mitigate such issues early on by monitoring the uptime of web servers using protocols like Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP).
  • API uptime monitoring: Websites often rely on disparate third-party or proprietary information systems to publish business data to end users. For example, a financial news site may depend on stock exchange APIs to publish real-time trading data such as stock prices and indices. In this case, the site may publish outdated data when an API becomes unavailable and potentially damage its reputation. By monitoring such APIs, businesses can mitigate issues timely by falling back to secondary API endpoints.
  • SSL monitoring: An apt SSL setup ensures the traffic between the website and end users is encrypted and secure. In recent times, using HTTPS on every URL has become an industry norm and a trust and safety factor in the end-user experience. By monitoring that their SSL setup is running as expected, businesses can ensure the safety and security of end users’ data and transactions.

  Monitoring checks can be set up based on time intervals such as every minute, or after a few minutes. Accordingly, alerts can be set up based on specific outcomes of the monitoring checks. For example, send an alert when the website is unreachable for two consecutive checks. Repetitive alerts can also be set up for critical alerts until the service or website is restored to normalcy.

  Some uptime monitoring solutions also help to set up uptime monitoring according to geography of operation. A company serving end users in multiple locations can gain more granular visibility into uptime for each region.
• Uptime monitoring solutions

  Uptime monitoring solutions

  Uptime monitoring solutions differ in their monitoring capabilities. Some solutions go beyond just uptime monitoring and offer comprehensive synthetic monitoring and real-user monitoring features.

  An ideal uptime monitoring solution should:

  • Send instantaneous alerts
  • Double-check uptime issues to eliminate false positives
  • Enable businesses to send alerts to the right teams and individuals
  • Send alerts via multiple channels like SMS or mobile push notifications and integrate with popular IT monitoring and alert management solutions
  • Attach root cause summaries and relevant details to an alert to help achieve expedited remediation
  • Help publish historical uptime data and current uptime status
  • Use a network of geographically distributed servers to perform enhanced uptime checks and provide more granular visibility into uptime

  In some cases, customers of a SaaS service also set up uptime monitoring to validate the authenticity of uptime data shared by a business. It’s therefore quintessential to rely on an uptime monitoring solution that performs uptime checks more accurately and reliably.