Network Downtime Costs Money
We
have seen in earlier emails how implementing SNMP can help avoid
network downtime by alerting you to potential problems before they
become emergencies. This is very important for your business, because
downtime starts costing staggering amounts of money very, very quickly.
Consider
to work for a small business which has 50 employees, each at a
fully-loaded cost of approximately $10,000 per month. (This is low for
experienced technical employees at present but about in-line with
present expectations for white collar office workers when you calculate
the costs of salary, benefits, taxes, and overhead.)
A
network outage on Monday morning - even one resolved in only 30 minutes
- will cost your business 25 employee-hours of productivity, because it
is virtually impossible to work these days without email, access to the
Internet, the documents on the file share, etc. That is a direct
economic cost of over $1,500 just for one almost trivial outage.
It
gets even worse for businesses which have substantial online components
to their business models. For example, large e-commerce merchants who
experience network problems during peak seasons can hemorrhage $100,000
in orders per minute of downtime. With this in mind you can
easily communicate the demand for a full scale network monitoring
solution to the responsible persons.
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PRTG Warns Because of Low Disk Space
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Acting Pro-Actively Is Always Less Expensive than Emergency Response
If
you miss a solid network monitoring solution, you are perpetually in
reactive mode. Your network generates emergencies - with regularity -
and you as the technical staff are bound and forced to clean them up
after the business was interrupted. This prevents you from doing other
high-priority work, and greatly increases costs.
Recapitulating the second part of this course,
imagine that you have five load balancer switches. Suddenly, one of
them shows an outage. PRTG will tell you immediately about this failure.
Additionally, you can easily see how much bandwidth is left on the
remaining switches. So you can see how quick you have to intervene
before this issue affects your daily business due to a lack of available
bandwidth on your switches.
Or
analyze available storage capabilities of your database. In PRTG, you
can define limits for your storage system to get a notification before
your disks run full. So, being warned days before there is no disk space
left and your database fails, you know when it is time to attach a new
hard disk rather than being surprised of full disks and have an
emergency situation.
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Network Monitoring Software Is an Inexpensive Investment with High ROI
As
we have pointed out previously, acting proactively will save you real
money. At every step in the scale, it is vastly, vastly less expensive
than expensive downtime or overprovisioning hardware. PRTG, for example,
starts at only $440/ €330, which is affordable on any budget, and the
overwhelming majority of our customers fit into the 1000 Sensor license
at $2,700/ €2,000. When we survey our customers, they tell us that they
often achieve positive ROI on PRTG within 4 months of purchasing it, due
to reduced staff extra hours due to unnecessary emergency cases,
reduced hardware purchases, and reduced or even avoided downtime. Tell
your boss and you will get the permission to buy within no-time.
If you haven't tried PRTG yet, the 30 day free trial will show you what you have been missing. See www.paessler.com/prtg.
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