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Published Date: October 18, 2022
Availability monitoring is the practice of observing the status of essential technology systems, whether they are services based on-premises or in the cloud. 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. 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. 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.
Availability 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. 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. 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.
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.
What is the difference between availability monitoring and availability management?
Availability monitoring is a practice nested within availability management, which is the process of planning, analyzing, operating and monitoring an IT service. The goal of availability management is to provide high availability and is a more comprehensive discipline than availability monitoring. The practice looks beyond simply monitoring the availability of a service and is designed to actively improve the availability of said service.
To achieve high availability you need the right combination of redundancy, scalability, load balancing, monitoring and backup.
Availability management is closely related to a number of other fields in IT, including IT service management (ITSM), observability and application performance monitoring (APM). There are many monitoring solutions nested within APM, such as synthetic monitoring, server monitoring, cloud monitoring, network monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM). 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.
Availability 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. 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.
Why is availability monitoring important?
Availability monitoring provides a method to ensure that technology products and services are in operation and running as expected. For almost every type of organization, technology is the lifeblood of operations. Take website monitoring, for example. If the home page of a business like Amazon or Facebook goes offline, a series of catastrophic events will quickly play out. 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.
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. During this time, over 14 million users reported they couldn’t use any of Facebook’s apps or services. Experts estimated that each minute of downtime cost the company $163,565, totaling around $60 million in lost revenue that day.
There are also productivity costs associated with downtime, since a company will have to sound an “all hands on deck” alarm to the IT staff, forcing staffers to scramble into action in an attempt to make hasty repairs and get services back online.
The purpose of availability monitoring is to avoid this kind of catastrophic expense, ensuring critical technology services — not just website endpoints but any type of hardware or software – remain up and running and in accordance with expectations.
Another major function of availability monitoring is to monitor the performance of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with third-party technology providers. When you engage in business with a service provider (such as an internet service provider or a cloud technology provider) the contract almost always specifies that the provider will reach a minimum level of availability, generally expressed as a percentage of uptime over a month or some other set time period. As such, it behooves the customer to keep track of the actual availability realized via uptime monitoring, for example. If the SLA is not being met — as measured by the customer’s availability monitoring solution — refunds or credits will be in order.
Downtime in an enterprise often results in customer attrition and significant financial losses.
What is service availability monitoring?
Service availability monitoring is a relatively uncommon term that describes the oversight of web-based services, namely external HTTP and HTTPS traffic or the functioning of web-based APIs. Most availability monitoring solutions have advanced in comprehensiveness and robustness since the early days of the web, and they now allow for oversight of a much broader collection of technologies than simple web services, including hardware devices, network processes, applications and other technology assets. There are a number of ways to monitor web-based services; you could use a cloud ping sensor to monitor TCP ping times, or a cloud HTTP sensor to monitor web server load time. That said, monitoring the availability of your web services remains a common and essential practice for almost every enterprise, as the web represents the front line for almost all customer interactions.
What is cloud availability monitoring?
As the name suggests, cloud availability monitoring targets cloud-based resources, measuring their uptime and performance. This type of monitoring is particularly essential for ensuring promised SLAs are being met. Cloud availability monitoring is important regardless of the type of environment being utilized, whether private, public or hybrid.
Cloud availability monitoring tools tend to be heavily focused on testing of various services. In contrast to on-premises applications, it is comparatively easy to run tests on cloud-based applications, because cloud services offer not only functionally unlimited resources but also usually include this capability as a standard feature. IT departments need not install additional software or contract with a new testing provider in order to stress-test a cloud application; this functionality is almost always built into the cloud platform.
In the broader sense of the term, cloud availability monitoring goes well beyond simple application monitoring, including the monitoring of additional cloud-based resources such as virtual machines, databases, web applications, websites, storage and more. Many of these subsystems might not ordinarily be termed an “application,” but the entirety of a cloud environment must necessarily be monitored in order to ensure the availability of the application running on top of it. As such, many cloud availability monitoring tools look at all components of the cloud infrastructure rather than a smaller subset of them, as may be common with more traditional monitoring tools.
What is application availability monitoring?
Application availability monitoring is the practice of ensuring an application — typically in an online setting — is operational and responsive. Application availability is important because users increasingly interact not with static data sources but with dynamic applications, whether on a website or webpage (such as when using a web-based email system) or when using an app on a mobile phone. Users in a corporate setting interact with applications hosted on the server regularly, as well.
Application availability is important because applications are distinct from network, server, and even website availability. All of these infrastructure elements may be operating normally, but an application running on top of them may fail. In this example, if only the server is monitored, IT management may assume everything is working fine. Only through monitoring the application availability directly will IT management be able to determine that users are experiencing problems and start searching for a root cause.
Application availability is an essential tool not just for ensuring uptime but for measuring the quality of the user experience. A good application availability monitoring tool will not just measure uptime as a binary metric but will gauge how responsive the application is, whether latency is a problem, the length of the average session, and whether any errors are being generated. Ultimately the goal of application availability monitoring is that IT management can use the tool to surface any problems while they are still minor and before they blossom into a major issue that takes the entire application offline.
What are availability monitoring best practices?
How do you ensure you’re getting optimum insight into service availability — and improve it over time? These best practices can help:
- Be smart about what you monitor: Monitoring every piece of hardware and software may sound ideal, but it isn’t practical. The thousands of monitoring agents required would overload the bandwidth of both infrastructure and available human attention, generating all manner of false or irrelevant notifications or alerts. Identify the most essential and risk-prone services in the enterprise and focus monitoring efforts on them appropriately.
- Test more frequently: One of the simplest ways to improve availability monitoring is to reduce the amount of time between checks. If you’re testing services once every five minutes, reduce that time frame to once every minute. Remember that the test interval is equal to the maximum amount of time that services can go offline before their absence is noticed. Are you willing to lose a maximum of five minutes of availability before you are even aware that there’s a problem? Continuous monitoring is the best possible option on this front.
- Test from multiple locations: With online services, outages can impact different users in different ways. A user in New York may see your service fine, but a user in Los Angeles may be having trouble for any number of reasons. If certain regions experience performance issues like sustained connectivity problems, this could be a sign that you need to create additional availability zones closer to the impacted users.
- Stress-test systems regularly: Availability monitoring tools allow IT management to construct synthetic tests that put substantial strain on systems — more than would normally be expected. This can give analysts a much more nuanced level of insight into the way that services are operating, while helping to prepare for future capacity needs.
- Automate wherever possible: Using humans to remediate every last outage and error condition quickly leads to overload, fatigue and unhappy IT staff. AI-powered automation and integration tools can take much of the burden off of human managers by streamlining the way that routine outages are handled, escalating only the most severe issues for human involvement. The ultimate goal with automated monitoring is to vastly improve response time and resolve problems before anyone is ever aware that there’s an outage — and before trouble tickets start pouring in.
- Understand how and when to escalate: There’s only so much an automated tool can do on its own. If a server catches fire, your automated tools will not be able to remedy the problem without aid. The key is that they need to understand when human involvement is required and escalate issues quickly and appropriately to a first-level technician. Similarly, those technicians need to be able to quickly triage issues and alert more senior staff when a situation is particularly dire. This requires training, stress-testing, simulated outages and, of course, lots of hands-on experience.
How do you get started with availability monitoring?
Because there are so many availability monitoring tools at different pricing levels — many available for free or at a very low cost — it’s easy to get started with the technology. For many users, it makes the most sense to start with the monitoring service or tools built into the services that you’re already using: If you use Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s natural to use the Amazon CloudWatch platform to monitor your AWS workloads. AWS provides a handful of custom operational metrics and alarms for free to get you started with the system. For organizations with modest availability needs, numerous simple, cloud-based monitoring tools are widely available. And remember that all major cloud service providers include some type of monitoring tool built into their platform, though these vary in robustness.
It’s easy — and wise — to start small with availability monitoring. Identifying a small number of critical systems and setting up monitoring tools to observe them. This could be your organization’s primary website, a key database or file server or a critical application. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter what device, application or service you choose to monitor. Just use the experience to understand how best to work with the monitoring tool, what happens when a failure occurs and how to set up synthetic stress tests. As performance data helps you gain familiarity with the platform, you can expand the number and type of systems that you monitor.
What is the future of availability monitoring?
While availability monitoring is likely to remain popular as a distinct discipline, more advanced tools related to IT service management (ITSM) and observability are beginning to subsume some of the features that were traditionally reserved for availability monitoring tools. Some standalone monitoring tools have been discontinued or deprecated in recent years, as IT organizations favor these more comprehensive, advanced solutions. AWS CloudWatch, for example, is a broad observability tool that can monitor almost any AWS service and uses machine learning to identify unexpected behaviors, a capability that goes beyond the traditional definition of availability monitoring.
That said, availability monitoring remains an essential practice in nearly every enterprise. Mission-critical infrastructure and services will only become more important as time goes on, and organizations which fail to maintain high availability across their operations are likely to suffer in the market.
Availability has become so important that when major web services go offline for even a short amount of time, it becomes national news. Consumers and businesses rely on technology products for a wide range of essential services; when these aren’t available, they suffer, and the organizations that provide those services also suffer. It can’t be stressed enough that customers now expect near-100 percent uptime from the organizations with which they interact. As such, it’s up to you to ensure your products remain highly available in order to avoid customer resentment, lost revenue and more.
