One of the aspects of choosing a network documentation/network monitoring solution is to help reduce the amount of downtime your network happens. What is downtime though? Downtime is when your network infrastructure is out of service and unusable which impacts your website, and applications. There are other impacts besides downtime that are also worth considering, too!
When calculating how much a minute that downtime costs an organization, many people quote Gartner’s cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute loss in their 2014 article (click here to read it). That’s a big sum, but keep in mind: that article is almost ten years old…. a report from Ponemon Institute (read the report here) calculates the average to nearly double that at $9,000 per minute! Keep in mind that is all relative within the industry you are in and how much revenue your organization makes in a year.
Uptime Institute more recently in 2022, came out with a report about downtime outages as well. One of the biggest culprits are: Power-related problems: (netTerrain DCIM with its Environmental Monitoring Module will help), and network issues, which this article will focus on. Another area of concern is… human error. Perhaps implementing a change management process or set of standard operating procedures would help with this (netTerrain does connect to existing CMDB solutions like Remedy and ServiceNow (learn more here)) and its own work order tasks .
Connect to, and visualize, your third-party apps like ServiceNow or Solarwinds in clicks
Going back to downtime, you can also try and calculate the cost of your downtime in your organization:
- Compute the lost revenue based on the yearly business hours.
- Multiply that by the number of hours and the percentage of the impact that downtime has.
Having tools like netTerrain will help you reduce your downtime, with the ability to search for information in seconds! Instead of wasting precious time drawing out a network diagram and trying to find the right spreadsheet to help with finding the device, netTerrain has a powerful search feature where you can search for any data field, like an IP or MAC address, and it will show you the device. There you can filter views to see what is connected to the device and the impact it affects (customers, applications, etc.).
Easily search across the network in seconds
In addition to the cost of downtime, the repercussions are felt internally and externally:
Loss of Productivity: If one of your main systems goes down, like MS Exchange, how will this impact on your internal and external customers? With many organizations relying on cloud applications, your customers could be left with barely anything to do while waiting for their application to be up and running. Hasn’t anyone not seen a fair share of this?
Impact on your Brand: Look what happened to Southwest Airlines outage earlier this year, which was caused by a network firewall failure that impacted data connection issues. Makes you wonder how customers will be repeat customers who got impacted with this outage. Downtime can negatively impact your company brand and reputation.
At Graphical Networks, after talking to our customer base, and our Customer Advisory Board, we put in a very conservative figure of 10% improvement operations related to downtime, namely: lower MTTR, reducing the amount of support calls, and fewer outages. How much will your company save by going with a network documentation solution like netTerrain?