Business continuity is a vital aspect of modern business operations. It is the ability to maintain essential business functions during and after unexpected disruptions or disasters. Downtime, in the context of business continuity, refers to periods when critical systems are unavailable. When such a catastrophe happens, the repercussions can be significant. For one, it can be costly—every moment of system unavailability can result in financial losses. When it comes to large-scale enterprises, unexpected downtime can translate to thousands or even millions of dollars in losses. There are many methods to mitigate unexpected downtime, and failover is the best of them.
Understanding failover
Failover is a specialized mechanism and a critical component in system redundancy and business continuity planning. It is designed to ensure uninterrupted operation when the primary system experiences a disruption or failure.
The primary goal of failover is to provide a seamless and automatic transition from a primary system to a secondary or backup system when the primary system becomes unavailable or experiences a failure. This transition occurs with minimal to no interruption in services, ensuring that business-critical operations continue without disruptions. It ensures that essential services, applications, and systems remain accessible to users, even in the face of hardware failures, software glitches, or unforeseen events like natural disasters.
Why does your network monitoring tool need failover?
A network monitoring tool needs failover for enhanced reliability and continuous operation. Failover ensures uninterrupted monitoring even if the primary system or server experiences downtime due to unforeseen issues. A network monitoring solution should have failover to:
- Maximize uptime: Failover mechanisms ensure that monitoring is never interrupted, thus safeguarding uptime.
- Provide redundancy: When an unforeseen issue occurs, if the primary server is lost, the monitored data will be lost forever. Redundancy prevents that from happening, and failover is one of the most reliable redundancy methods out there.
- Ensure business continuity: Unexpected downtime can be catastrophic to business continuity. If efficient failover methods are in place, you can be assured of uninterrupted business continuity and an unparalleled customer experience.
- Promote network resiliency: When a primary server fails, the secondary server will take over almost immediately. And since the data collected by the primary server hasn’t been lost, network operators can use that data. The collected data can be used to gain insights to prevent the same issue from occurring again, thus promoting network resiliency.
How does OpManager’s failover mechanism work?
OpManager’s failover method employs two components: a primary server and a secondary server. During regular operation, the primary server takes the lead, actively handling incoming requests, processing data, and providing services to users and clients. OpManager continuously monitors both the health and performance of the primary server. This meticulous monitoring ensures that your network remains in top condition.
Detection: When OpManager detects a failure or a disruption in the primary server, it triggers the failover process. Failures can include unresponsiveness to pings, hardware failures, software crashes, or network issues.
Trigger: Upon detecting a server failure, OpManager’s failover mechanism springs into action. The secondary server, meticulously configured to mirror the primary server, is activated and seamlessly takes on the primary server’s responsibilities. This transition can be automatic, following predefined thresholds and criteria, or manual, initiated by administrators as needed.
Once the failover process is complete, the secondary server assumes the role of the primary server, ensuring uninterrupted service to users and clients. Meanwhile, the original primary server, which experienced the failure, may require maintenance or repair before it can be brought back online.
Failback: Failback is the process of returning operations and responsibilities from a secondary server back to the primary system once it has been repaired, restored, and deemed stable. In scenarios where the secondary system may not possess the same resources, capacity, or performance as the primary system, failback is crucial.
By returning operations to the primary system, OpManager ensures that organizations can practice 24/7 monitoring.
OpManager’s failover capabilities
OpManager offers significant benefits to business enterprises by ensuring network resilience, minimizing downtime, and enhancing overall operational efficiency. With OpManager’s failover process in place, businesses can expect their employees and their customers to experience uninterrupted service.
High availability: OpManager’s failover capabilities provide high availability by ensuring that network monitoring and management services are consistently accessible. Even in the event of a primary server failure, OpManager’s secondary server takes over seamlessly, guaranteeing uninterrupted access to critical monitoring data and tools. It minimizes the risk of downtime, protects against data loss, and helps organizations meet their SLAs with clients and customers.
Uninterrupted uptime: OpManager’s failover mechanisms guarantee uninterrupted network monitoring and management, and bring downtime to a minimum. When a primary server experiences issues, OpManager swiftly switches operations to a secondary server, ensuring that network monitoring and management continue without interruption. This reliability is critical for businesses that rely on network connectivity to deliver services, support critical applications, and reduce potential revenue losses.
Uptime monitoring: OpManager’s uptime monitoring checks the availability and the health of network devices. OpManager pings your network devices once every two minutes by default, and it will categorize a device as unavailable if it fails to respond after two attempts. Network admins will also be notified regarding the downed device, and the issue can be pinpointed with OpManager’s root cause analysis to enable troubleshooting as soon as possible. With this, your network devices can have 99.999% availability, and failover will be triggered if the primary server fails to respond to the ping sent by OpManager’s uptime monitor.
With OpManager’s failover capabilities in place, business enterprises can ensure network reliability, minimize downtime, and enhance overall operational efficiency, which can promote 24/7 availability and an uninterrupted digital experience.
For a more hands-on approach to learning more about OpManager, download our free, 30-day trial. Get a free and personalized demo to try OpManager yourself. Request a quote to evaluate the best options for your organization.
