A company should detect issues early, check service outage and predict potential website problems to minimize negative outcomes. Improving the user experience and ensuring third-party SLA compliance requires careful uptime tracking. An effective strategy includes active monitoring, real user monitoring, and a plan for managing service-level agreements.
What is website uptime?
“Website uptime” refers to when a website or web service is accessible to users during a specific time frame. Typically represented as a ratio of the available time divided by the total time, this calculation is performed monthly or yearly.
The internet industry regards 99.999% uptime as high availability, although achieving 100% uptime is the ultimate goal by using specific tools to check Soundcloud status or availability of any platform.
Websites are likely to experience downtime, whether planned or not. Hence, website providers need to aim for optimal uptime, given the competitiveness of the internet. To meet this target, most brands aim to achieve five-nines availability or high availability.
Active Monitoring
Active monitoring agents or nodes simulate user behavior in continuous tests to detect outages, latency, and other significant metrics. These tests run 24/7 to help businesses predict potential issues with user experience. IT teams can set up alerts to notify them when vital thresholds are exceeded, such as downtime lasting longer than X seconds or many users experiencing latency of more than 5 seconds.
SLA Management
SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS companies have written agreements with their customers. These agreements, known as service level agreements (SLAs), outline the performance standards that the application is expected to meet. If the claimed performance levels are not met, then the SaaS provider is in breach of the agreement.
Customers who violate the SLAs will receive penalties. Businesses should utilize active and real user monitoring and monitor their third-party applications to ensure they comply with their SLAs and meet the agreed-upon uptime percentage.
Real User Monitoring
Real user monitoring (RUM) is a method of using performance monitoring software to collect data from actual users of a website or application. By analyzing this data, companies can detect any issues that users may be experiencing and address them before they affect the overall performance of the site or app.
Why is Website Uptime Monitoring Important to Businesses?
Downtime affects e-commerce businesses and other types of businesses as it prevents customers from accessing their websites. This can result in decreased sales for these businesses:
- E-commerce stores become inaccessible when they experience downtime, which is equivalent to being closed. Therefore, e-commerce companies must ensure maximum uptime.
- SaaS companies must ensure that their applications are always available or risk violating their SLAs, which can result in fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Nowadays, many large travel websites rely on their uptime to generate revenue. They require their website to be available and the other websites they use to find the best prices.