As digitalization moves full steam ahead, remember the overarching mandate to keep brownouts and outages in mind during DX planning.

As businesses continue to embrace digital transformation, availability has become an organization’s most valuable commodity. Availability refers to the state of when an organization’s IT infrastructure, which is critical to operating a successful business, is functioning properly.

However, when an organization experiences an influx in demand or another catastrophic IT issue, availability is affected, and downtime can occur at an alarming rate.

One of the biggest challenges organizations face is that availability is difficult to maintain and is indiscriminate, even for the world’s largest enterprises. 

Even the most advanced and resource-rich companies have battled through expensive outages that not only impacted their businesses, but also exposed society’s growing dependence on technology to perform key functions of our daily needs.

As technology continues to advance, IT outages will continue to ensue and will affect more than just an organization’s bottom line.

Downtime is a major issue

Outages occur when an organization’s services or systems are unavailable, while brownouts are when an organization’s services remain available, but are not operating at an optimal level.

According to LogicMonitor’s latest observability survey of IT decision-makers, 51% of enterprises saw an increase in IT downtime during the pandemic, with much of it caused by the shift to remote work, the Internet of Things (IoT), and migration to the Cloud. In the Asia Pacific region (APAC), respondents also mentioned edge computing as a key contributor.

  • 48% of APAC IT leaders said they had seen an increase in IT downtime due to the pandemic since March 2020.
  • 48% of respondents in APAC had seen an increase in downtime since the pandemic began, compared to 57% in North America and 50% in EMEA.
  • Lost productivity topped the list as the most negative impact APAC IT leaders have experienced as a result of IT brownouts (63%) and outages (59%), followed by lost revenue (45% for brownouts and 41% for outages). Third on the list of most negative impacts for brownouts was lowered stock price at 37%. Third on the list of the most negative impacts of outages was damage to brand/reputation at 34%.

Beyond the financial impact, many organizations have had to double the size of their teams to troubleshoot problems, and it still takes them twice as long on average to resolve them.

Comprehensive monitoring is key

To combat downtime, it is critical that organizations have a comprehensive monitoring platform that allows them to view their IT infrastructure through a single glass panel. This allows potential causes of downtime to be more easily and quickly identified before they can negatively impact the business.

Evaluating monitoring solutions can be an arduous but necessary task, and the importance of extensibility cannot be overstated. Companies must ensure that the selected platform integrates well with all its IT systems and can identify and address gaps in a company’s infrastructure that may cause outages. It is also imperative that the selected monitoring solution is not only flexible, but also gives IT teams early visibility into trends that could signify trouble ahead.

Taking it a step further, intelligent monitoring solutions that use AI for IT Operations (AIOP) functionality can detect the warning signs that precede issues and alert organizations accordingly. 

Ultimately, whether adopting new technologies or moving infrastructure to the Cloud, enterprises must make sure that availability is top of mind, and that their monitoring solution is able to keep up.

By selecting a scalable platform that provides visibility into their systems and forecasts potential issues, businesses can rise to the next level without sacrificing availability. This type of visibility will not only prevent downtime and system outages, but also keep organizations from hitting unwanted headlines.