How to Measure Downtime

Learn about Downtime, including how to measure it, and leverage it in dashboards and visualizations with Metabase.

What is Downtime?

Downtime is an important metric describing how long your product has been partially or entirely non-functioning. Ideally, especially for products that cater to the functionality of other businesses, your products and services should be up and working all the time with no downtime whatsoever. Depending on who you serve, downtime can be calculated to the second. Places like banks need you to be up 100% of the time to ensure there are no transaction errors. If your downtime is high, your business might struggle to keep or gain customers, as you’ll gain a reputation for being unreliable and having a product that isn’t stable.

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How to calculate Downtime

Downtime will be represented as a percentage. You’ll need a timeframe to calculate down, like the lifetime of a product you’re looking to calculate the downtime for. In order to get the percentage you’re looking for, you’ll need to take the total downtime and divide it by the total time the product has been active for. For example, if your product has been up for a year and has had 2 full days’ worth of downtime, you’ll want to take the 2 days and divide it by 365. That’s a whopping 0.5%! Generally, you want your services to be at 99.9% uptime, so 0.5% might mean it’s time to look into what’s going on behind the scenes and make adjustments to the stability of your product.

Other KPIs to measure related to Downtime

  • Recovery Point Objective
  • Change Failure Rate
  • Lead Time For Changes
  • Mean Time Between Failure
  • Error Rate
  • Online Application Performance
  • Cost of New Development
  • Automated Test Pass Percentage
  • Response Times

Why build a dashboard for Downtime?

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How to use Metabase to measure Downtime

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