How to Measure Online Application Availability

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

What is Online Application Availability?

Online application availability is a metric used to determine the reliability and stability of a product and whether or not it meets the needs of an end user or organization. The goal of any application is to have the highest availability possible to prevent any stoppage in use. This can include timeouts, DNS errors, and any hiccups overall. It’s important to determine your online application ability to ensure that your networking, backup data, and processing are all working together to ensure that your product is online at all times.

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How to calculate Online Application Availability

You can visualize online application availability by taking your total time experiencing errors and dividing that by a specified amount of time. For example, if you had 5 errors in 250 hours, that would be 98% online application availability. Your application would be fully available 98% of the time.

Other KPIs to measure related to Online Application Availability

  • Lead Time For Changes — how long a commit takes to reach production.
  • Uptime — the percentage of time a service is available; the baseline reliability metric.
  • Error Rate — failed events over total requests, sessions, or users per window.
  • Cost of New Development — what net-new feature work costs per period, set against maintenance and rework.
  • Mean Time Between Failure — average operating time between failures; the reliability counterpart to MTTR.
  • Online Application Performance — response times and throughput as users actually experience them in production.
  • Time to Value — how quickly new customers reach their first meaningful outcome.
  • Build Time — how long builds and CI pipelines take end to end; slow builds drag every feedback loop.
  • Recovery Point Objective — the maximum data loss a recovery can tolerate, measured against actual backup cadence.

Why build a dashboard for Online Application Availability?

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How to use Metabase to measure Online Application Availability

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