The Cost of Downtime: How Real-time Monitoring Can Drive Corrective Actions

By Kumar Gandharv

An hour of downtime would mean losing over $500,000. Downtime is expensive and detrimental to a company’s financial?health.

A Forrester study revealed that?35%?of IT businesses in the US are hit by unexpected downtime every month. Lest it becomes a massive cost to enterprises, they can leverage real-time monitoring to control the damage.

Real-time monitoring detects issues as soon as they arise, allowing organisations to take corrective actions promptly. This can prevent problems from scaling, resulting in extended data downtime.?

Detect early

Real-time monitoring systems are designed to monitor the system’s performance and identify anomalies or deviations from normal operating conditions.

When a problem is detected, the monitoring system can be configured to send alerts to the appropriate personnel, such as IT staff, network administrators, or other relevant stakeholders. This enables businesses to proactively address issues before they result in significant system downtime or data loss.

Further, it helps ensure that computer systems and networks operate efficiently and reliably, reducing the risk of costly downtime incidents that can impact business operations and revenue. The following comprise the steps to establishing a real-time monitoring system:

• The first step is to define what needs to be monitored, such as specific applications, servers, network devices, or databases.
• Set monitoring thresholds for each monitored system. These thresholds define acceptable performance levels and specify when an alert should be triggered if a system exceeds or falls below those levels.
• Install monitoring software that can continuously monitor systems and network performance, such as CPU usage, memory usage, network latency, or disk I/O.
• Configure alert notifications?to notify the appropriate personnel when a system exceeds or falls below the set thresholds. Alerts can be sent via SMS, email, or push notifications.
• Prioritise alerts based on their severity level so that the appropriate personnel can address critical issues first.
• Investigate the issue the monitoring system identifies and resolve it fast, ideally before it results in significant downtime or data loss.
• Continuously review and adjust monitoring thresholds based on changing business needs, system performance, and other factors.

With real-time monitoring, businesses gain insights into systems and data by providing consistent data on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, server uptime, application response times, and user engagement. It helps them identify weaknesses and optimise performance by swiftly identifying and addressing issues before they become significant problems.

For example, real-time monitoring tools can be used for server and application monitoring, tracking performance, CPU and memory usage, network latency, and error rates. This helps businesses identify issues with their infrastructure, such as overloaded servers or poorly performing applications and take steps to optimise performance.

Benefits

Early detection of outages can allow for faster resolution and reduced downtime in many ways.?

• Early detection of an outage allows businesses to identify the root cause of the problem promptly. This enables them to start addressing the issue immediately instead of wasting time figuring out what happened.?
• It allows businesses to alert the right people who can address the problem rapidly. This can include IT staff, network engineers, or other relevant personnel. Alerting the right people can lead to faster resolution times, as they can start working on the issue immediately.
• Early detection prevents cascading failures, where one system failure leads to another. By detecting the problem early, businesses can isolate the issue before it spreads to other systems, minimising the impact of the outage.
• Finally, this results in reduced downtime. By addressing the issue speedily, businesses can restore systems and services faster, reducing the overall downtime experienced by customers or end-users.

The downtime issue is time-sensitive, making automated responses a good solution. With automated protocols in place, the moment an outage occurs, an alert is generated, and the relevant personnel are notified.?

Further, it analyses the issue and identifies its root cause, which saves valuable time that would have otherwise been spent on manual analysis. Automated response protocols can execute pre-defined steps to fix the issue without waiting for manual intervention. This can include restarting services, resetting configurations, or triggering failover mechanisms.

Once the issue has been resolved, automated protocols can continue monitoring the system to ensure it remains stable and alert the team if it resurfaces.

Holistic view – the way forward

Comprehensive reporting capabilities provide a detailed and holistic view of system performance, incidents, and trends. By collecting and analysing system performance and incident data, reporting tools can provide insights into patterns, trends and anomalies that may indicate issues or risks. It thus provides multiple benefits;

Improved visibility:?Reporting tools can provide a comprehensive view of system performance and incidents, enabling teams to quickly identify issues and track their impact on the system.

Better decision-making:?With detailed reports, teams can make informed decisions about addressing issues and allocating resources effectively.

Faster issue resolution:?Reports can highlight patterns and trends that may indicate the root cause of an issue, enabling teams to resolve it faster and prevent similar problems from occurring in the future.

Proactive monitoring:?By analysing data in real time, reporting tools can identify potential issues before they become critical, enabling teams to address them proactively.

Compliance and audit:?Comprehensive reports can provide an audit trail of system performance and incidents, essential for compliance and regulatory purposes.

The valuable insights enable teams to make informed decisions and take proactive measures to prevent downtime and improve system reliability.