100% availability - No Problem

Don't Oversell Availability, warns Peter Warren.

You've maybe never heard of S3, but the chances are you've used a website that uses it either wholly or in part in the last month.

Costs of Unavailability

Commentator Peter asks if I can expand on the subject of ‘cost per lost production hour’ in this post on Availability – which is what I intend to do in this post.

Firstly let me say I don’t consider myself an expert in this, having only had to address this once in my career. What I will do is discuss some of the main factors you I believe should consider – if you can think of others, you should add them to the comments below.

Availability & Downtime Summary

Commentator Robert asks for a ‘page where all the [availability] posts are joined together’. This post is to provide just that.

The first post is an introduction post: ‘Using Serio to obtain Availability statistics’. In short, this post:

Availability Reporting Round-Up

This is my final post (for the time being) on the subject of Availability reporting. I’ve posted quite a bit about this recently – the previous post in the series is Availability & the Performance Graphs (this has links to the other posts).

Recall from my previous post I listed the Availability graphs, but left discussing them for this post. The graphs I mentioned were

Availabilty & the Performance Graphs

This is my penultimate post on the subject of Availability statistics. The earlier post on this was Accessing Availability Statistics.

If you’ve read an understood everything up to this point (then give yourself a gold star) you’ll want to know how you can access Availability data.

This information is available through the SerioClient Chapter called ‘Performance’ (click the link underneath ‘Tools’). If you open a Performance Chapter you’ll see the following graphs that you can use:

Accessing Availability Statistics

This post continues the topic of obtaining Availability statistics through Serio. The previous posts were ‘Using Serio to obtain availability statistics’ and ‘More on Availability statistics’.

To recap, I’ve said that:

More on Availability Statistics

Recall that I started a thread about obtaining Availability Statistics from Serio in my last post. I talked about identifying your Key Systems and thinking about the (Service Level Agreement) SLA you have with customers widely.

Recall also that if you want to access more of the theory there is a companion availability white paper available on our web site.

Using Serio to obtain Availability Statisics

Those of our Serio’s customers who have employed me as a consultant, or those whose accounts I handle, probably know I have a few (OK, many) hobby horses. One of them is Service Level Agreements (SLA), and in particular thinking about the SLA both widely and in terms of business need. Or put another way, there is rather more to it than setting target response and resolve times for each Incident that the Helpdesk/Service Desk handles.

In particular, it is important to consider Availability. What I mean is this:

Monitoring web applications

With a new Command Center release due very soon, I thought I'd post on one of the new features which interest me most.

The Command Center now has revised HTTP web monitoring functionality. This is more than just pulling off web server statistics though.

Instead, you can now login to web applications, test the pages of the web application, and then log off again. In doing so, you can test for page not found errors, time out errors and so on.

A Serio upgrade is on the way

As I have the honour of writing our first blog entry, I thought I’d start by saying we have an upgrade coming within the next four weeks. As usual, we’ll issue upgrade instructions to all customers with a support contract when the upgrade is ready, along with full info on what is new and how to upgrade.

One of the most significant changes is to our Command Center tool. This product is used for monitoring servers, network links, printers and so on, and is part of our Availability Management offering.

Availability Management