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Availability: Time Warp

Terry Critchley

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."
Abraham Lincoln

Some of the outage figures quoted by organizations look ludicrously small to me. Without casting aspersions on the veracity of these figures (or availability statistics), I do feel that some examination of them is needed.

The non-availability of a system is often quoted thus:

where MTTR is the Mean Time To Repair a particular outage.

”We recognized we'd run the wrong job and restarted correctly in just 3 minutes, thus our MTTR = 3 minutes."

If you substitute the word "recover" for "repair" in the above definition you will be closer to the truth. However, your database(s) are almost certainly on Planet Zog as far as consistency is concerned and the "repair" of that will often take much longer. The correct definition of MTTR should be "mean time to recover" and the equation then looks as above but with a new MTTR:

The last item in this equation I call the ramp up time, the time to get the show back on the road. This can be small but is often much larger than repair time, as shown in the diagram below. A decent Service Level Agreement (SLA) will opt for this definition of "fixed" for an issue and will include the ramp up time in the recovery time specification.

The recovery of a database or other data and metadata corrupted by human error or malware can take a considerable time to restore to the working status demanded by the end users.

This is borne out by several “Never Again” cases outlined in the Availability Digest (under the heading: Never Again) where financial bodies — banks, stock dealings — have repaired faults but taken many hours to recover normal working conditions again. ”The system was repaired at 11am and trading commenced normally at 2:30pm" is a typical (hypothetical) report on such situations.

The final point to make is that there are several viewpoints of an “outage” or period of "downtime", depending on your place in an organization. The end user's view will be that the outage lasts as long as he/she is prevented from using IT to do the job they are supposed to do. The server specialist's view might be that the outage of his hardware was a mere minute or two before it was fixed whereas the network person will say" “what's all the fuss about; everything on the network is working fine?”

It all depends on your viewpoint and I know what viewpoint the company CEO, the users and the board will take. Do you?

Dr. Terry Critchley is the Author of “High Availability IT Services” ISBN 9781482255904 (CRC Press).

Hot Topics

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In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

Availability: Time Warp

Terry Critchley

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."
Abraham Lincoln

Some of the outage figures quoted by organizations look ludicrously small to me. Without casting aspersions on the veracity of these figures (or availability statistics), I do feel that some examination of them is needed.

The non-availability of a system is often quoted thus:

where MTTR is the Mean Time To Repair a particular outage.

”We recognized we'd run the wrong job and restarted correctly in just 3 minutes, thus our MTTR = 3 minutes."

If you substitute the word "recover" for "repair" in the above definition you will be closer to the truth. However, your database(s) are almost certainly on Planet Zog as far as consistency is concerned and the "repair" of that will often take much longer. The correct definition of MTTR should be "mean time to recover" and the equation then looks as above but with a new MTTR:

The last item in this equation I call the ramp up time, the time to get the show back on the road. This can be small but is often much larger than repair time, as shown in the diagram below. A decent Service Level Agreement (SLA) will opt for this definition of "fixed" for an issue and will include the ramp up time in the recovery time specification.

The recovery of a database or other data and metadata corrupted by human error or malware can take a considerable time to restore to the working status demanded by the end users.

This is borne out by several “Never Again” cases outlined in the Availability Digest (under the heading: Never Again) where financial bodies — banks, stock dealings — have repaired faults but taken many hours to recover normal working conditions again. ”The system was repaired at 11am and trading commenced normally at 2:30pm" is a typical (hypothetical) report on such situations.

The final point to make is that there are several viewpoints of an “outage” or period of "downtime", depending on your place in an organization. The end user's view will be that the outage lasts as long as he/she is prevented from using IT to do the job they are supposed to do. The server specialist's view might be that the outage of his hardware was a mere minute or two before it was fixed whereas the network person will say" “what's all the fuss about; everything on the network is working fine?”

It all depends on your viewpoint and I know what viewpoint the company CEO, the users and the board will take. Do you?

Dr. Terry Critchley is the Author of “High Availability IT Services” ISBN 9781482255904 (CRC Press).

Hot Topics

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.