Uptime monitoring is the monitoring of the availability of an IT system. This can be a computer, a network, a server or a website. The term “uptime monitoring” is made up of “uptime” and “monitoring”. Observed availability is reported as a percentage, e.g. 99.9%.
Whether it’s your colleagues’ computers, a server-controlled production plant or a company website, a company’s IT must always be available and function smoothly. Even 90% uptime means that a system is unavailable for an average of 2.4 hours per day. Calculated over a year, this is over 36 days. With an availability of 99.9%, a system is unavailable for an average of 8.64 seconds per day, and around 53 minutes over a year.
Uptime monitoring can be used to monitor each individual device. In the event of failures, the administrator is alerted to restore availability as quickly as possible. As part of uptime monitoring, detailed data is often collected, e.g. on utilization, available bandwidth, and incoming and outgoing data traffic. This information can help detect or prevent cyber incidents .
A typical encounter with uptime monitoring is usually when the corporate network goes down, you call your IT department or your external security service provider to let them know that the Wi-Fi is not working, and they get the answer that they already know. This knowledge probably does not come from previous phone calls, but from the report of the uptime monitoring.
Optimize your company’s uptime monitoring. Talk to your IT department or an external IT security service provider about this. Have your company’s existing uptime monitoring evaluated and checked for optimization. Ask for optimization of availability as well as optimization of monitoring in order to additionally reduce the cyber risk of your company.
