According to a New Relic survey of IT professionals, the median annual cost of IT outages has reached an astronomical $7.75 million. Over one-third of the 1,700 respondents said critical business application outages now cost more than $500,000 per hour. In a business environment where most interactions with customers, suppliers and business partners are conducted digitally, downtime has become a problem and an existential threat.
Most IT organizations carefully monitor two key metrics - mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) - to track their success in identifying and remediating critical systems issues. The figures represent, respectively, the average time it takes administrators to identify that a problem has occurred and to remediate the underlying issues. They serve as a benchmark for understanding the organization's level of awareness of the status of its systems and the speed with which problems can be diagnosed and acted upon.
There are many ways to improve performance against these metrics, but three stand out as the most effective, as evidenced by New Relic and the survey results. Monitor Everything The less you know about a problem, the longer it takes to diagnose and fix. The New Relic survey measured 17 different observability categories, such as network monitoring, alerts, log management, browser monitoring and distributed tracing. Across the board, about two-thirds of the companies that used even one of those monitoring tools reported reduced MTTR, with many saying resolution times had fallen by more than 25%. One-third of respondents whose organizations implemented full-stack observability-which is the ability to see everything in the tech stack that could affect the customer experience-reported the fewest outages, fastest MTTD and MTTR, lowest outage costs and highest median annual return on investment compared to all respondents. For example, those who have full-stack observability experience a media
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