We’ve been thinking for quite a while how we could improve transparency in uptime reporting. Almost always, there is a formal or informal Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the group that manages the resources and the ones that are responsible. Sometimes it’s handled internally between the IT department and the internal customer – and very often it’s between a service provider and a customer. Part of the ongoing evaluation and part of the financial compensation is the uptime metrics and these numbers needs to be easily accessible and trusted.
We have now introduced a new and richer monthly reporting which means that our customers will get a monthly email with an Excel spreadsheet. Not only can you see performance in terms of uptime, but you can also see when you had downtime and when it started and ended.
When I was running a large hosting provider a few years ago, we didn’t have a monitoring system that took into account when we had scheduled maintenance windows and we had to subtract these manually from the uptime reports which was always a hassle. Therefore, we have implemented functionality in the Awakish reporting so that you can turn off monitoring during a maintenance window and that will not hurt your uptime SLA. These maintenance windows will be visible in the monthly report which means that a service provider and a customer will get full transparency between themselves.
And as it is in Excel, it’s easy to add your own calculations for downtime compensation and to consolidate every month into an annual report.
Nothing special or fancy, but we’re proud of our new monthly report that we think makes business sense. Please let us know if there is anything that we can do take it further.
Regards, Per