

37signals publishing uptime data - wlll
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3067-lets-get-honest-about-uptime

======
pandemicsyn
Best part of the article:

"we’re not juking the stats here by omitting “scheduled” downtime"

Nice, you score some karma points there. Excluding "scheduled" downtime has
always bugged me (including when my employer does it). When you're down you're
down, thats kind of the end of the story. Whether or not your customer can do
what they payed you for is all that matters to them.

------
moe
tldr; 37signals has average uptime, like everyone else.

Next up: 37signals publishes office room temperature...

~~~
bradleyland
Go ahead and dismiss this, but I found it valuable. It's not often that a
high-profile company publishes their own uptime data, and it has a clear and
useful purpose to me. When I'm planning for uptime and making agreements with
our customers, it's nice to have a point of reference. In other words, if
37Signals has a hard time getting to four-nines, I would anticipate similar
struggles. I may write a four-nines (or five-nines) SLA, but I'll write the
penalties in a way that doesn't shoot a hole in my boat.

Yes, we have our own uptime data, but we're a young company, and we're still
scaling. Coincidentally, on a similar stack to 37Signals. More data is better.

------
freejack
the data is pretty meaningless unless they include a definition of downtime
and how they are measuring it.

For instance, they could be monitoring from an internal network and their
methodology might not pick up external network outages that take their DC off
the air (just an example of why the method and definition are important...).

I don't doubt that they have a great track record of reliability, but this
presentation seems a bit thin.

~~~
dhh
We use pingdom to measure external uptime, so network issues will count as
downtime as well.

Do you have any other questions about methodology? I'd be happy to elaborate.

~~~
freejack
No not really, although again the value of the stats all depends on what is
being monitored and how, etc. For example, Pingdom can report that an SMTP
interface looks just great while at the same time it is impossible to send
mail on that port because of a bad disk or another failure somewhere else. We
use pingdom too and it is a great tool and transparency is definitely great
but any number of user impacting events can and do go unnoticed (depending on
how you are monitoring and what you are monitoring...)

A great example is that as I write this, I just realized that our public
Pingdom network status reports are offline... I count this as downtime against
our global availability stats, but it isn't an event that would show up in my
pingdom reports :)

~~~
freejack
Stats are back... weird :-) <http://about.hover.com/networkstatus> (as an
aside, making it easy for customers to see uptime/downtime and network events
eases the burden on customer service and makes it much easier for potential
customers to check your credibility. easy to implement and definitely a plus
for the business overall).

~~~
dhh
That's nice but feels more like a status page to me than a way to gauge long-
term uptime (which is what we were going for here).

For our application outages, it's been pretty well correlated that if pingdom
can't get a 200 OK on the test pages we've set up, it's been down. And I don't
think we've had much if anything slip in under a 200 OK but still being down.

I'm sure we're still off by a couple of minutes here and there, but the big
picture should be quite accurate.

~~~
freejack
Its both, but primarily status. If you drill down, you'll see the long term
stats.

------
trotsky
I was a bit surprised when I checked out their hosting situation. Only in one
DC (suburban chicago) and up until about a year ago they were only using one
network provider. Now they're on three, apparently they had some real pain
points before being multi-homed. I'm guessing the year's timing isn't
accidental.

Still not bad numbers considering. Running multiple DC's can be quite a pain
in the ass and a money drain, and maybe that's one of the advantages of having
really loyal customers. A good example of there being many viable paths to a
goal.

~~~
themcgruff
The timing is not tied to our move off of Rackspace and on to our own
hardware, or our move to multiple providers. Noah and JD finally had time to
work on making this data public and so we did. The fact that it happened at
the end of the year is coincidence.

Re multiple sites, we're working on it.

------
petercooper
The good thing about 2012 being a leap year is you can have a full day down to
do maintenance and still meet a 99.997% 24*365 uptime (credit to @steve_evil
for this).

------
namidark
Is this what 37s has been up to? I feel they are going the way of ENTP ( see
Lighthouse ticket tracker ) ...

~~~
dabeeeenster
How do you mean?

~~~
namidark
They have a few products that haven't had any forward momentum in a while
(stagnant) -- go look at entp and lighthouse if you want more of an example

------
hiroprot
Following David's lead, we've published our stats for Forkly as well:

[http://blog.forkly.com/post/15190891337/lets-get-honest-
abou...](http://blog.forkly.com/post/15190891337/lets-get-honest-about-uptime-
forklys-take)

------
petercooper
Finally, a HN post where <http://damnyouwilljessop.com/> is directly relevant
:-)

------
pors
For real transparency you'll have to allow a third party to provide your
public uptime data

~~~
themcgruff
This is something we may make available in the future, but we believe this
presentation is easier to digest for the majority of our customers. Right now
Pingdom data is going straight into our internal metrics dashboard which
produces the public pages, so minus our internal annotations, it's exactly
what you'd see in Pingdom. In the past we used a different site monitoring
product, and we had to import all the data before closing our account there.
(So we can't make that available directly anymore.)

------
eberfreitas
This is great! It would be also cool to see a response time report.

------
michokest
How is this news?

~~~
namidark
Its news in that every time they make a blog post its the best thing in the
world and has to be on the front page

------
thepumpkin1979
Maybe 37signals is thinking in launching 37HerokuYardCloud.

~~~
thepumpkin1979
why the down vote? :S

