OK, let’s move on from latency for now. The next key performance metric in LOTUs is Outages. Seems like a no brainer, doesn’t it? Either my network is up, or it’s down. And when it’s down, I know it because Netflix stops streaming. 

But think for a minute about the repercussions.

The JitterWorks Network Performance Monitor (NPM) will alert you the moment your network goes down. It may be natural to think “won’t we know when the network goes down?” But what happens when the network goes down before anyone is in the office? When it goes down at 8am and you don’t know it until you get in for an important 9am Internet phone (VoIP) call or team video conference with a client. Or you have 10 employees coming to work, all using cloud-based data files and applications. Production comes to a halt until you can figure out what is wrong.

Think about business today. The Cloud has made it very easy to access important documents and applications from home. Many companies have a Business Connectivity Plan (BCP) in place when the office network is down. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to contact your employees and tell them to “work from home today, people, the network is down. I’m on it” before they get to the office and figure out they can’t log in?

What happens when your store opens at 10am but the network has been down since midnight? You can’t make a sale because your POS system only works with a solid Internet connection. The problem could have been fixed before the doors opened and you started losing money.

If your company has a Service Level Agreement with your ISP, you probably have an outage guarantee. Some to the point where you get a refund if the outages for the month exceed a certain amount of time. Many SLA’s only start the clock on outage duration when you call and a trouble ticket is opened. Your problem could have started many hours earlier but nobody was in the office to know it. An instant alert of an outage can start the process of fixing the problem when it occurs, not when it’s discovered.