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.
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:
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:
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 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:
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.
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