Server / service downtime. For a well managed company, you would expect these to be almost uniformly green, meaning that all servers are responding correctly almost all of the time. This graph has a lot of yellow and red, indicating severe instability in their services.
Not being able to keep servers running is something that typically happens to smaller companies that grow too fast for them to manage. Established companies are (or, IMO, should be…) expected to have near perfect (>99.99%) uptime, and this is indicative of some expertise loss for the company broadly.
I actually manage servers and network services, and am familiar with the importance of five nines uptime. It seems like this kind of an interface is a failure in that it provides quick information to most people but doesn’t include information for people with disabilities. I think it would be beneficial to have that visual interface with color information but to also include information that showed bars of different heights and widths.
I understand that the direct inclusion of all of the numbers could clutter the interface and make it less easy to immediately tell uptime, but even without the numbers it seems that significant improvements could be made to the way this information is presented with this layout.
yeah it’s not a great design. It could easily be a line graph where the the vertical axis is a log scale representation of each day’s uptime . You’d still be able to tell at a glance which services are stable (top marks across the board) and which services have dips. you could even still have the line change colors when it dips below a certain range if you just really wanted colors on it. it would even zoom infinitely* since the horizontal axis can be arbitrary buckets of time, and the vertical axis is always 0%-100% uptime
down to whatever your health check interval is, at which point the graph would just alternate between 0% and 100%, and up to the full lifetime of the service. still, it could be nice for analyzing some service failures.
TBF, no, established companies tend to have something between 99.9% and 99.99% of uptime. It only increases if the company is explicitly focused on it, at a large cost that usually needs to be paid by some customer.
But Github pretends to be one of those companies that focus on uptime. And it’s also less than 99% right now. So yeah, the main point stands.
Yeah that’s fair. It’s part of the advertising in some sectors, but not all. A lot of the companies I’ve bought products from tend to advertise their uptime, and that’s the type of company I think about when I think about uptime stats. However, a lot of the companies I’ve sold products to tended to not talk about it, and their uptime was often in the 2 nines to 3 nines, if not a lot worse. Somehow they still managed to keep going lol. Some of them anyway.
Server / service downtime. For a well managed company, you would expect these to be almost uniformly green, meaning that all servers are responding correctly almost all of the time. This graph has a lot of yellow and red, indicating severe instability in their services.
Not being able to keep servers running is something that typically happens to smaller companies that grow too fast for them to manage. Established companies are (or, IMO, should be…) expected to have near perfect (>99.99%) uptime, and this is indicative of some expertise loss for the company broadly.
I actually manage servers and network services, and am familiar with the importance of five nines uptime. It seems like this kind of an interface is a failure in that it provides quick information to most people but doesn’t include information for people with disabilities. I think it would be beneficial to have that visual interface with color information but to also include information that showed bars of different heights and widths.
I understand that the direct inclusion of all of the numbers could clutter the interface and make it less easy to immediately tell uptime, but even without the numbers it seems that significant improvements could be made to the way this information is presented with this layout.
yeah it’s not a great design. It could easily be a line graph where the the vertical axis is a log scale representation of each day’s uptime . You’d still be able to tell at a glance which services are stable (top marks across the board) and which services have dips. you could even still have the line change colors when it dips below a certain range if you just really wanted colors on it. it would even zoom infinitely* since the horizontal axis can be arbitrary buckets of time, and the vertical axis is always 0%-100% uptime
TBF, no, established companies tend to have something between 99.9% and 99.99% of uptime. It only increases if the company is explicitly focused on it, at a large cost that usually needs to be paid by some customer.
But Github pretends to be one of those companies that focus on uptime. And it’s also less than 99% right now. So yeah, the main point stands.
Yeah that’s fair. It’s part of the advertising in some sectors, but not all. A lot of the companies I’ve bought products from tend to advertise their uptime, and that’s the type of company I think about when I think about uptime stats. However, a lot of the companies I’ve sold products to tended to not talk about it, and their uptime was often in the 2 nines to 3 nines, if not a lot worse. Somehow they still managed to keep going lol. Some of them anyway.
Thanks. I was thinking it was something biological, or some sort of light spectrum and was getting confused.
They have always reminded me of bright line spectrographs. Now that you mention it I see the resemblance to DNA tests too.