What is Uptime?

At its core, uptime is a metric observed by organizations of all sizes in order to better understand a system’s overall reliability. It is best described as the time that services are online divided by total active availability.

Let’s delve a bit deeper.

Uptime can be defined through a few different lenses, including absolute value (363 days) or percentage (99.7%), among others.

Here is a brief example of the uptime metric in its construction:

365 days x 24 hours = 8,760 active hours
8,760 active hours – 10 hours unavailable = 8,750 available hours
8,750 available hours / 8,760 active hours = 99.885% uptime

99.8% is an exceptional percentage in terms of a math class midterm grade; however, in terms of uptime for enterprise-grade, mission-critical services, this presents an opportunity for improvement in terms of full-service reliability.

While uptime is typically used as a surface-level measurement, it is critical to earning and preserving the trust and loyalty of customers big and small that depend on your services in order to keep their businesses up and running.

In a world where seconds matter, reliability is a top priority to ensure a perfectly and consistent customer experience, which is why uptime is so important. Still curious about what true reliability looks like? Check out how Nelnet increased uptime with the help of PagerDuty, or give PagerDuty a try today.