Uptime monitoring has a direct impact on your organization’s ability to support end-users and deliver services. Not maintaining adequate uptime can interfere with business productivity and impact end-user satisfaction, eventually resulting in financial losses.

Establishing uptime can be a challenging task since there are numerous factors that can act against it. Manual uptime monitoring is a labor-intensive, resource-consuming task; employing an uptime monitoring solution is an effective and economical way to combat this and ensure network uptime.

What is uptime monitoring?

Uptime is the duration for which a particular IT system or a network is available for its users. Uptime monitoring is a process for keeping track of the health and availability of the network components to ensure they are operating at optimal efficiency.

Major advantages of monitoring uptime

• Satisfy client service-level agreements (SLAs)—The cost of not meeting a client’s SLA can be devastating. It can force you to pay hefty fines, lose brand value, lose customers, and eventually cause loss of business.
• Identify the root cause and fix downtime issues rapidly—The longer the delay in identifying and resolving an issue, the longer the end user’s business suffers. By monitoring uptime, you can quickly identify critical issues and deploy fixes immediately.

How to determine network uptime?

100% network uptime is a myth. However, with effective uptime monitoring, you can prevent unpredictable downtime which causes the most business losses.

You can calculate your network uptime with some simple math:

For example, if your network is down for one day total during an entire year (24 hours), this is how you calculate your network uptime:

You can identify your network uptime by using network monitoring tools like ManageEngine OpManager. This solution efficiently tracks uptime and sends alerts if something has gone awry. Besides checking network uptime, it provides extensive monitoring services to keep your business operational during network disturbances.

How to improve network uptime

Network uptime can be improved by closely monitoring key factors that indicate a probability of network failure. Deploying timely preventive measures will facilitate continued network operations. Network uptime details and performance indicators can be obtained by collecting data and analyzing the following potential points of failure

• Network health:

This is the most complex and fundamental of all network monitoring functions largely due to the variety of network components used by many organizations. Individual silos of network devices are created, based on the category of network components utilized, making it difficult to see the larger picture.

The best method to prevent device siloing is to create a unified network map displaying all assets including interfaces, physical and virtual devices, and interconnections. This helps you gain an overall picture of the network health at any point of time.

• Security patches:

The frequency of patches applied and security updates rolled out has drastically increased. Installing most security updates or patches requires a system restart. Although restarts are fast, devices are still unavailable for a time.

To bypass this vulnerability, careful planning and resource management is required. Business-critical devices have to always be up and running and, for this reason, maintenance breaks cannot extend over long periods. It is also advisable to run a failover or failback service as a safety measure in case of a device failure during a maintenance break.

• Hardware warranties:

Most organizations use a large number of endpoint devices, and most of their maintenance expenses are covered in warranties. A device’s warranty data can help an organization identify devices that have been functioning past their warranty. With this data, the IT team can identify the devices that are at significant risk of failure, and the performance functions that can be impacted by these failures.

• Software inventory:

Software tracking is essential for organizations that invest in a number of software applications. Software tracking facilitates better update and upgrade management in addition to license tracking.

Opting for unified tools offers the functionality of several tools and can eliminate tool-based issues like tool switching, license management, etc., and cut down on capital overhead.

Work with an expert uptime monitor

Reliable networks can play a pivotal role in boosting productivity, increasing revenue, and satisfying customers. Choosing the right network uptime monitoring software is vital. In this blog, we’ll see how OpManager performs as an uptime monitoring tool by providing uptime monitoring for an organization’s various requirements.

Device uptime

OpManager monitors network device uptime using monitoring protocols such as ICMP, TCP or SNMP. And if the device is not responding after a predefined number of polls, the device is classified as unavailable. The number of pings and their interval can be optimized to your specific requirements.

Interface uptime

OpManager oversees the uptime of a wide variety of interfaces ranging from Ethernet to ISATA adapter, and their port availability using SNMP protocol. OpManager can also monitor a number of interface performance metrics.

Service uptime

Services are essential to ensure whether your servers are online and working as desired. Essentially, OpManager functions as a server uptime monitoring solution by allowing you to monitor system-level services, such as DNS, SMTP, LDAP, Telnet, HTTPS, MSSQL, MySQL, to ensure your server management plan is complete

Windows service uptime

Windows service is a critical process that supports vital server functionality. Using OpManager, any Windows services can be discovered and monitored using the WMI protocol. Further, admins can configure OpManager to restart or stop a faulty Windows service.

Process uptime

Processes, in addition to services, play a pivotal role in running a server. OpManager enables you to monitor the uptime of processes running on Windows, Linux, Solaris, UNIX, HP UX, IBM AIX, ESX, and VMware servers, and virtual machines.

Website uptime

Monitor website availability around the clock. OpManager can be configured to monitor HTTP and HTTPS URLs, intranet sites, web server farms, web applications, Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) authenticated websites and many more.

OpManager’s dashboard feature can be configured to display the real-time holistic status of the uptime of the various aspects of a network. This facilitates easier issue identification and enables network admins to enact remediation measures promptly.

Want to learn more about OpManager? Start exploring the product with a free, 30-day trial.