100% Uptime ?!

'Tis the end of the year, and all of the inevitable "2023 wrap-up" emails have started to come in.  It reminded me that I used to do this "Yearly Uptime" on how our servers and datacenters did in the past year, as far as the percentage of offline (downtime) vs online (uptime) they achieved.  The goal is typically 5 nines, or 99.999% uptime.

"Five 9s uptime" is a term used to describe a system's reliability level, which is 99.999%. This means that a system is fully operational 99.999% of the time, with an average of less than 6 minutes of downtime per year. 

How did we do?

Well, I put the spooler in the title!

​For the preceding 365 days, which is the longest our monitoring software keep this particular metric, the network had a 100% uptime.  That means the hardware, servers, datacenters were never off at all in the last year.  This is actually a little surprising to me as well -- I know we have excellent availability, but usually someone at one of the datacenters misconfigures something to take us offline for a little bit.. 

Well done, datacenter staff, facility engineers, backup power generators, and redundant Internet connections!

But what does 100% really mean?

It means that the datacenters were up, the servers hardware was up, and the Internet connections were up.  On an individual application basis, which we are not reporting here (i.e. your MRSware installation), it may not be 100%.  We could have restarted your system for a major MRSware Desktop update, or restarted individual installations if there was a particularly egregious error that need to be cleared.  

Of interesting note in that regard, restarting an installation's service for updates only applies to Desktop updates.  MRSweb, Web-only update, do not require a restart -- the system just merrily continues to run and get the new code on the fly, as the User is navigating the Web app.

This certainly does maximize uptime, and let's us all enjoy the holiday season without thinking about whether the system will be available when we need it.

Happy Holidays to All, and looking forward to a great 2024!