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System availability and performance: Trends observed in 2024



When it comes to ensuring system availability and performance, the stakes have never been higher. Let's start with two important statistics:
  • 55% of data center operators experienced an outage in the last three years.
  • 21% of the outages in 2023 were with the public clouds and internet giants
If you think moving from on-premises servers to a third-party, well-established data center or public cloud will eliminate the possibility of an outage, the above data should make you think again. While the probability of an outage may be reduced, in the world of modern networks, it is a constant threat. 

Simply put, outages can be mitigated but not avoided. Depending on your business' scale, a crimped network cable is all it takes to crumble your reputation with your customers. Let's explore the common threats you'll face when it comes to managing your IT infrastructure. 

System availability is still questionable

In a survey by the Uptime Institute, 54% of data center operators cited power as the cause of their most recent outage. You read that right—even with the latest technologies and backup protocols, power remains the primary cause of outages. Let us see the other common reasons for datacenter outages:
  • Overheating
  • Hardware and software issues
  • Network issues
  • Security issues
When any of these issues occur, an outage is inevitable. But does this have to mean catastrophe for your IT infrastructure? No.

Sysadmins and site reliability engineers (SREs) have evolved over the years and have built resilient IT Infrastructure systems. Strategies like failover, incremental backups, and more ensure that your sysadmins can get your systems back online. But does this mean everything will be fine? Again, no. 

Though the chances of the entire IT infrastructure going down is low, even a single down server or VM could mean any of these situations:
  • A user is unable to complete a financial transaction.
  • A dependent VM, server, or application is unable to function.
  • A developer is unable to access a critical database.
This is why sysadmins strive day and night to keep your system availability as close to 100% as possible. A robust mechanism should alert your directly responsible individuals (DRIs) the instant a performance degradation or system outage occurs. Site24x7, an AI-powered observability platform, has got you covered. Site24x7's lightweight server monitoring agent sends an alert immediately when your server is unavailable.

Business performance is tied to system performance

Performance degradation can cripple your IT infrastructure. Here are three real-world use cases where performance degradation snowballed into an outage:
  • An improperly configured application spiked the CPU utilization to 100%.
  • An application made verbose log prints due to a bug and filled the disk.
  • An EC2 instance kept using the internet instead of the virtual private cloud (VPC) and the organization received a six-digit bill.
Any of these scenarios could happen to the most sophisticated IT infrastructure setups. In the first case, if the sysadmin knew when CPU utilization crossed 90%, the application could have been stopped and configured properly. In the next case, if the sysadmin knew either the log file's size was larger than expected or the disk was running out of capacity, the bug could be fixed. In the third case, if the sysadmin knew the network bandwidth had crossed the threshold, they would have set a limit. 

In all these scenarios, the common problem is what the sysadmin didn't know. With Site24x7, in addition to watching your system's uptime or availability, the server monitoring agent constantly keeps an eye on more than 80 performance and health metrics. The solution triggers alerts to the relevant DRI* when even one of these metrics crosses the line. 
Idea
*Rather than alerting the entire sysadmin team, the sysadmin or SRE responsible for the specific system at the time of outage will receive the alert. 

Fix issues without overtaxing your team

Organizations are embracing automation and AI to:
  • Reduce the workload on staff.
  • Improve time to detect (TTD) and mean time to repair (MTTR).
With Site24x7's server monitoring, you can achieve both. The solution's IT automation features jump into action when any threshold has been breached. Auto-remediation actions include running a script or command, restarting the service when it goes down, recycle an IIS application pool, and so many more. 

How does Site24x7 help businesses ensure system availability?

Site24x7 is the trusted companion for sysadmins and SREs from over 13,000 organizations, including global financial institutions, internet giants, and startups.

It is an AI-integrated, secure lightweight agent that not only observes your uptime but also keeps a constant watch on your server's:
  • CPU
  • Memory
  • Disk
  • Network
  • Files
  • Directories
  • Firewall
  • Logs
  • Processes
  • Services 
Try Site24x7's server monitoring suite on as many servers and hosts as you'd like for free. Or, schedule a personalized demo with our product team to see Site24x7 in action.