IT Answers » Server uptime

Computing uptime of client server machines

Jim4522 — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:33:55 +0000

Question Edited by Serena3

Meeting IT’s server SLA obligations

Jim4522 — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 08:34:02 +0000

Most large IT organizations provide Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with there end-users. I never hear of a IT organization that fails to meet that obligation so my question is why? Is the obligation so low that it can’t be not met or is IT management that good that it is responsible for meeting it.

A 99.999 uptime percentage means that in a 30 day month of 43,200 minutes every server could be down for 43 minutes and still meet that obligation. Are IT organizations setting their obligation too low?

I know that the vendors talk about uptime percentages of 99.9999 or 99.99999 but I don’t see those percentages in Service Level Agreements. What percentage does your IT organization use?

What is the average uptime percentage of servers?

Jim4522 — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 08:18:39 +0000

You hear a lot of statements from venders usually based on polling as to to what the average percentage of servers per year is and yet the only ones who would really know this percentage are those that actually measure it. Can anyone who does measure their uptime percentage tell me what that percentage is? Thanks.

Counting uptime of servers monthly

Jim4522 — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 22:15:07 +0000

I recently put a question that asked if IT organizations track the uptime and down time of servers and Jim Teik responded, “In data center they do because they need to give report of system up time every end / beginning of the month.

I have four follow-on questions:

1. Is the uptime that is reported the uptime of the hardware or the operating system?

2. If I have a virtualized server that is running 10 instances of the operating system and the hardware runs exactly one month between reboots, do I log one month of uptime because the hardware was up for only one month, or do I log ten months of operating system uptime because each of the operating systems were rebooted?

3. In this monthly report to management do I also report the number of reboots that occurred each month so that management knows how many incidences occurred?

4. Is there existing software does all these counts?