In today’s world, the Internet is an integral part of everyday life, connecting people, businesses, and services across the globe. As such, when an outage occurs and millions of people are left without access to their favorite websites or apps, it serves as a stark reminder of just how interconnected and delicate the Internet is. Recently, a major outage left millions of users across the world unable to access websites such as Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, and Reddit, highlighting the fragility of the Internet infrastructure.
The task of keeping track of IT systems has changed vastly over the years. Decades ago, IT teams were mostly responsible for managing local area networks (LANs) which were much simpler to monitor than today’s cloud-based systems. Nowadays, with the prevalence of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, IT teams are increasingly reliant on external networks and providers for their services, thereby increasing the potential for outages and other problems due to a single issue impacting multiple systems.
Application performance management (APM) and infrastructure performance management (IPM) are two approaches to ensuring that IT systems are running smoothly and efficiently. APM focuses on monitoring the performance of individual components of a system while IPM looks at the system as a whole. The two differ in their usage of synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), and profiling instruments. Synthetic monitoring uses automated tools to simulate user interactions with an application or system while RUM involves tracking actual user interactions with a system in order to detect and diagnose issues. Profiling instruments are used to analyze system performance over time.
The recent outage demonstrated just how interconnected different systems can be and how one issue can have far-reaching consequences. Additionally, it was clear that this was not an isolated incident as outages of this kind are becoming increasingly common due to the reliance on external networks and providers for IT services.
When opting for SaaS applications instead of in-house software systems, IT teams gain certain benefits such as scalability and cost savings but also increase the potential for outages due to their reliance on external networks and providers. Furthermore, many SaaS applications have become so popular that they have become a critical part of IT infrastructure as they are used by companies across multiple industries. This has resulted in a “single point of failure” situation where outages in one application can cause cascading failures in other applications since they are all connected to each other in some way.
In conclusion, outages such as the recent one illustrate how interconnected and delicate the Internet is today. Decades ago, keeping track of IT systems was simpler because they were on LANs; now, from CRMs to email servers, they rely on external networks and providers for their services which have proven to be far from failsafe. Application performance management (APM) and infrastructure performance management (IPM) are two approaches to ensuring that IT systems are running smoothly and efficiently while SaaS applications offer certain benefits such as scalability and cost savings but also increase the potential for outages due to their reliance on external networks and providers. It became clear that the recent outage was impacting page load times of various websites not connected to Facebook. As outages become increasingly common due to the reliance on external networks and providers for IT services, it is essential that companies have a comprehensive plan in place in order to minimize downtime in case of an outage.