Skip to main content

Availability ≠ Responsiveness

Robin Lyon

How many of us IT professionals have been in a meeting similar to this: The chairs of various departments throughout the company are sitting around a long table and are giving a monthly summary.  IT presents that the applications, network and servers were some amount of 9’s available and may explain an outage. The meeting goes on and then one of the heads explains a failure to meet department goals by stating some application was "slow."


IT is asked about it but unfortunately can only present data upon number of tickets and general up time. The slow comment is then picked up another department and IT is left in the untenable position of defending its metrics and supposedly achieved goals while other departments are blaming IT for lack of productivity. 

The real problem is one of communication of expectations. IT has data that supports availability but the customer is complaining of slowness. Slowness is a subjective term and for IT to resolve the difficulty different metrics and SLAs are needed. Fortunately, there is a perfectly good way to measure slowness – time. When we think of availability we need to understand we are actually speaking of capacity while the users are interested in throughput. 

By measuring transaction time (the amount of time it takes for the user to commit an action and receive the corresponding data from the program they are using) IT can state how fast an application is working in objective terms. SLAs can be established that some percentage of the transactions during a reporting period will be completed within a certain amount of time. This allows business decisions based upon performance and is a salve for the mysterious "slow" comment.

Availability is one of the early metrics IT has used to create a simple number to represent complex systems. 

Robin Lyon is Director of Analytics at AppEnsure.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Availability ≠ Responsiveness

Robin Lyon

How many of us IT professionals have been in a meeting similar to this: The chairs of various departments throughout the company are sitting around a long table and are giving a monthly summary.  IT presents that the applications, network and servers were some amount of 9’s available and may explain an outage. The meeting goes on and then one of the heads explains a failure to meet department goals by stating some application was "slow."


IT is asked about it but unfortunately can only present data upon number of tickets and general up time. The slow comment is then picked up another department and IT is left in the untenable position of defending its metrics and supposedly achieved goals while other departments are blaming IT for lack of productivity. 

The real problem is one of communication of expectations. IT has data that supports availability but the customer is complaining of slowness. Slowness is a subjective term and for IT to resolve the difficulty different metrics and SLAs are needed. Fortunately, there is a perfectly good way to measure slowness – time. When we think of availability we need to understand we are actually speaking of capacity while the users are interested in throughput. 

By measuring transaction time (the amount of time it takes for the user to commit an action and receive the corresponding data from the program they are using) IT can state how fast an application is working in objective terms. SLAs can be established that some percentage of the transactions during a reporting period will be completed within a certain amount of time. This allows business decisions based upon performance and is a salve for the mysterious "slow" comment.

Availability is one of the early metrics IT has used to create a simple number to represent complex systems. 

Robin Lyon is Director of Analytics at AppEnsure.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...