“Technologists have long measured availability as a product of the availability of all the devices within their care. That absolutely has a place and is important to such concerns as cost, mean time between failures, headcount needs, redundancy needs, mean time to restore, and so on. But it doesn’t really relate to what the shareholders or customers care about most; what these constituents care about most is that the service is available and generating the greatest value possible. As such, measuring the experience of customers and the generation of profits in real time is much more valuable for both answering our first and most important monitoring question and measuring availability. With only a handful of monitors we can satisfy one of our key management measurements, help ensure that we are identifying and reacting to impending and current events, and align our culture to the creation of shareholder and customer value.”
—Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott, The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise.
