The most destructive root cause of 75 percent of outages during big online events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are unplanned configuration changes to a system – when IT and Ops teams find something they think might cause a problem and try to fix it immediately, unintentionally creating a much bigger issue for the web or mobile site.
The following are BigPanda's top recommendations for preventing outages during throughout the entire holiday shopping season:
- Identify the systems that are mission critical to your business. Many companies don't and try to treat their entire system as business critical – and this is a mistake.
- Have a bulletproof plan for your critical services. Once you've identified what your critical services are, know how to keep them up with a bulletproof plan for them. For instance, if Amazon checkout goes down – you need a disaster and recovery plan for this. But if the Recommendation Engine has problems, this is not at the same level of criticality.
- Tier your services. Having 3-5 tiers makes prioritization and response much easier, quicker and more effective when there is a problem. And make sure you have a backup and failover plan for the highest tier of your services.
- You don't need failover for everything. IT and Ops teams who try to have failover for everything often discover that they don't have it ready for anything.
- Don't become overly focused on the components of infrastructure. Make sure you are spending more time and focus on your services.
- Make sure you have planned for load capacity. Not planning for the sheer volume of people visiting your web or mobile site accounts for 25 percent of outages during big online events.
- Use a tool that allows you to consolidate your IT data. Implementing an alert correlation platform allows IT and Ops teams to separate signal from noise and focus more on the customer experience by providing a consolidated view of their IT alert data. This allows them to stop being reactive firefighters and become proactive before an issue has the chance to affect the customer.
Michael Butt is Director of Product Marketing at BigPanda.
The Latest
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 5, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the network source of truth ...
A vast majority (89%) of organizations have rapidly expanded their technology in the past few years and three quarters (76%) say it's brought with it increased "chaos" that they have to manage, according to Situation Report 2024: Managing Technology Chaos from Software AG ...
In 2024 the number one challenge facing IT teams is a lack of skilled workers, and many are turning to automation as an answer, according to IT Trends: 2024 Industry Report ...
Organizations are continuing to embrace multicloud environments and cloud-native architectures to enable rapid transformation and deliver secure innovation. However, despite the speed, scale, and agility enabled by these modern cloud ecosystems, organizations are struggling to manage the explosion of data they create, according to The state of observability 2024: Overcoming complexity through AI-driven analytics and automation strategies, a report from Dynatrace ...
Organizations recognize the value of observability, but only 10% of them are actually practicing full observability of their applications and infrastructure. This is among the key findings from the recently completed Logz.io 2024 Observability Pulse Survey and Report ...
Businesses must adopt a comprehensive Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) strategy, says Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT analyst research firm. This strategy is crucial to bridge the significant observability gap within today's complex IT infrastructures. The recommendation is particularly timely, given that 99% of enterprises are expanding their use of the Internet as a primary connectivity conduit while facing challenges due to the inefficiency of multiple, disjointed monitoring tools, according to Modern Enterprises Must Boost Observability with Internet Performance Monitoring, a new report from EMA and Catchpoint ...
Choosing the right approach is critical with cloud monitoring in hybrid environments. Otherwise, you may drive up costs with features you don’t need and risk diminishing the visibility of your on-premises IT ...
Consumers ranked the marketing strategies and missteps that most significantly impact brand trust, which 73% say is their biggest motivator to share first-party data, according to The Rules of the Marketing Game, a 2023 report from Pantheon ...
Digital experience monitoring is the practice of monitoring and analyzing the complete digital user journey of your applications, websites, APIs, and other digital services. It involves tracking the performance of your web application from the perspective of the end user, providing detailed insights on user experience, app performance, and customer satisfaction ...
