WEB APPLICATION AVAILABILITY MONITORING SERIES

During this time, over 14 million users reported they couldn’t use any of Facebook’s apps or services. When Facebook experienced an outage in the fall of 2021 (along with sibling sites WhatsApp and Instagram), the sites were unreachable for around six hours. Whether there’s an informative status page or simply an inability to connect, customers will immediately become angry, revenue will functionally drop to zero, and - eventually - users will begin to defect to alternatives, damaging the reputation of the business along with its financial health.

WEB APPLICATION AVAILABILITY MONITORING SERIES

If the home page of a business like Amazon or Facebook goes offline, a series of catastrophic events will quickly play out. For almost every type of organization, technology is the lifeblood of operations. Why is availability monitoring important?Īvailability monitoring provides a method to ensure that technology products and services are in operation and running as expected.

As with availability monitoring, one aim of availability management is to ensure the enterprise is operating at the peak of its capabilities - though the ultimate goal of availability management is to promote continuous improvement. RUM takes availability monitoring a step further by providing visibility into the user experience of a website or app by passively collecting and analyzing timing, errors and dimensional information on end users in real time.Īvailability management is also a component of the widely used ITIL framework, which sets out standard processes and best practices for optimizing IT services and minimizing the impact of service outages. There are many monitoring solutions nested within APM, such as synthetic monitoring, server monitoring, cloud monitoring, network monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM). In this article, we’ll examine the relationship between availability monitoring and availability management, methodologies used to ensure both are delivered at a high quality, and some of the most common tools used in this essential IT discipline.Īvailability management is closely related to a number of other fields in IT, including IT service management (ITSM), observability and application performance monitoring (APM). Some of the best practices to ensure high availability include understanding the major sources of risk due to a potential outage in the enterprise, implementing a regular stress-testing plan and relying on automation wherever possible. Poor availability can have a massive impact on the enterprise, and in most organizations that includes a direct hit to revenue and profitability, unhappy customers and loss of reputation. Availability monitoring works best when both real-time and predictive tools are used, enabling IT teams to react to issues quickly, before they become catastrophic.Īvailability monitoring is a subset of availability management, an IT process designed to monitor and manage IT services - from planning and implementation through operations and reporting.

Yet availability monitoring tools can also be used to create more complex tests to give more information and probe whether services are accessible from various locations around the globe, measure the speed of their response, report any errors and determine the reasons for failures. At their simplest, availability monitoring tools can report on a system’s uptime status in real time by periodically polling a service on a set schedule to ensure it is responsive. Availability monitoring is the practice of observing the status of essential technology systems, whether they are services based on-premises or in the cloud.

Web application availability monitoring