99.999% Uptime? Not Anymore.

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

Recently this article was published by the New York Times. An excerpt follows:

"MA BELL spoiled us. AT&T’s dial tone set the all-time standard for reliability. It was engineered so that 99.999 percent of the time, you could successfully make a phone call. Five 9s. That works out to being available all but 5.26 minutes a year."

The article goes on to talk about how major service providers like Facebook, Paypal, Google have not been able to meet this goal — and why it make not be practical/cost effective to achieve this goal in the near future. And if the best of the best can’t meet this goal, what about the rest of us?

In the analog world of MA BELL, dial tone was not only easy to measure but also soothing. And, most importantly, dial tone was a clear measure of success.

In today’s digital world, there is no dial tone. You dial the number and hit send on your iPhone. Will the call go through? Will I be able to hear? Will the call get dropped? Will I get stopped by the police for driving and talking on the phone without a handsfree device? More importantly, will I have a productive conversation with whomever I am talking to?

I realized this 10+ years ago before I started Tealeaf. Even though all the status codes were "HTTP 200" and all of the pages were fast and available, my web-based applications still failed and I didn’t know why.

So, performance and availability measures are not enough. In order to understand the customer experience, you have to be able to see it.