Throughput vs. Uptime:

The Two Sides of Real Performance

Throughput and uptime are two crucial elements working together to affect business performance.

Uptime is a basic metric that essentially means — is your system alive? Throughput is the rate at which a system, network, or process produces, transfers, or processes data within a defined timeframe.

A real-world way to think of throughput is as miles per gallon. It measures how much useful output (miles traveled) is produced per unit of input (one gallon of fuel). Or in an environment — what is actually going on in the deployment? How efficiently is the system performing? How much data can be moved within a certain amount of time?

Uptime then is a question of — does the car turn on?

Uptime is a crucial metric to look at, but it doesn’t tell the full story. This is where other metrics like throughput come in.

My Uptime Is Fine — Why Does Throughput Matter?

Uptime is important, but uptime alone doesn’t tell you the full performance story.

Downtime is obvious. It’s very clear to any organization when their system isn’t online, which means downtime is usually easy to spot across organizations. Throughput issues, their effects, and how they’re noticed highly depend on the organization impacted.

For example, a radiology organization works with large numbers of complex scans. A company like this might not notice drops in throughput because so much data is being processed so often, their workload isn’t sensitive in that way.

However, what about an organization that provides medical transportation to patients for doctor’s appointments, hospital visits, etc.? For this type of organization, a drop in throughput would be felt right away. Their queue of callers would build and their ability to address them would be compromised.

A relatively small drop in throughput can have a proportionally oversized business impact depending on how an organization operates. Even though uptime isn’t this nuanced, it simply isn’t enough to say that you provide 99.99% uptime. Uptime is a just measurement of if your application is online or not.

It guarantees access, but it doesn’t guarantee performance or responsiveness.

Uptime and throughput are especially important to consider during the hours your business operates, as this is when your environment sees the heaviest traffic. Downtime during business hours will immediately halt all productivity and impact every customer. Even though throughput might not have such a dramatic effect, times of heavy traffic are when we most often see issues bottlenecking throughput. Work may still be getting done, but it’s slowed down to such a degree that it can significantly hurt your business.

You want to ensure you have a system that can stay online and perform well no matter the time of day or traffic load.

How Do Uptime & Throughput Impact Organizations?

There’s a difference between your system being on and your system actually keeping up with your business.

Let’s say you’re experiencing a network issue:

Customers and staff can be online — the system is ‘up.

However, the network is unable to process requests, and requests that can be processed have volume limitations because of infrastructure degradation — poor throughput.

Whether you’re experiencing downtime, issues with throughput, or both, the trickle-down effects of these problems can seriously impact your organization.

The system is online, but barely functional OR your application is frequently ‘down’.

• Work is delayed or not getting done at all.
• Employees and customers are left frustrated.
• Staff get fed up and leave.
• Customers feel they can’t trust your organization to deliver what you’re offering.
• Profits take a hit.
• Your reputation is on the line.

For example, in the field of radiology, uptime and throughput can impact business in the following ways:

Doctors can’t do their jobs — they can’t get patient results or see patients in a timely manner.

Patients have trouble checking in — it takes a long time for anyone to provide help or clear answers because office staff can’t access the PHI they need.

Staff decide to leave your practice, further hurting productivity and efficiency.

Patients get fed up and chose to switch to a different organization.

Revenue decreases and trust in your organization is hurt.

Minimal connections or connections constantly going ‘down’ can also cause problems with images and patient data being written to disk, creating further issues for the integrity and performance of the practice.

Providing reliable, unmatched performance gives you a competitive edge.

When you have a deployment designed for your organizational needs and built for scale, you have an environment that consistently performs the way it should — eradicating disruptions from downtime or poor throughput.

Customers trust that you’ll be able to deliver on your promises.

Staff aren’t left frustrated by lags, crashes, etc.

Reputation and profits are bolstered, not threatened

Uptime and throughput are two sides of the same business growth coin. If you can’t scale good uptime and throughput, no matter what kind of organization you have, you risk the death of your business.

Why Uptime Alone Doesn’t Tell the Full Story

Uptime is an important metric, but it’s also been the most cited metric for a very long time. In the days of old, outages and inconsistent service were just part of the game. Uptime was adopted as a critical metric in the early 2000s because having a product that was online most of the time set companies apart. Today, hardware and software are more advanced than they used to be. Now, if a company cannot provide 99.99% uptime, they’re not considered a serious contender in the field.

This doesn’t mean uptime isn’t as important as it used to be, it just means that it’s not the only crucial metric you should be paying attention to. Having a system that is slow is better than a system that won’t come online, but having a fast system is better than both of those options. For example, if a page loads in 30 seconds versus 1 second, both are considered ‘up’, but one is nearly unusable.

At Protected Harbor, we treat uptime as the baseline — not the definition — of performance.

Performance Depends on Throughput & Design

Computers are logical — they only do what they’re designed to do. This means that it’s crucial that a deployment is designed correctly/ tailored to the unique needs and goals of your business. How your environment was built plays a crucial role in both uptime and throughput.

Was your environment built with your unique business workflow in mind?

Was your environment built for scale?

What happens when systems aren’t designed to handle sustained, simultaneous work?

Throughput measures how much of a thing can be done in a specific time period. Throughput is critical, especially at scale, because if you can’t add more users, features, reports, etc., then the platform slowly deteriorates.

If your organization hasn’t made a fundamental code change in a couple of decades, this will make any mobility now extremely painful and time consuming.

Maybe your organization is trying to make do with a hodge podge of servers trying to balance requests or put specific clients in specific places. This is unsuccessful because it’s arduous to manage, not sustainable, and doesn’t address core infrastructure deficiencies.

When your business is still starting out, a bad deployment won’t have the same impact as trying to scale to 1,000 users or even 100. Business growth exposes the architectural limits of a deployment not built for scale. This creates a painful user experience, threatening productivity and customer satisfaction. A scalable environment is crucial because without it, the growth of your organization is severely limited. If your business can’t grow, you die.

Another issue is misinterpreting problems as they arise. Let’s use an analogy: renting a speed boat as a novice versus an experienced fisherman.

As a novice, you can steer around a lake, catch some fish, catch some sun, but you’re not a skilled fisherman. You don’t know where the different schools of fish are, what the currents are like, how the water moves, or even how you should maneuver your boat to be most optimal. Now something that seemed trivial at first is actually more complicated. It involves understanding the weather, the lake, and your boat all at the same time to be efficient.

This analogy helps us understand why some IT teams misinterpret the data. They are the novice renting a boat, but they have the same contract as a fisherman, which is an impossible task.

A skilled professional has the knowledge and tools necessary to build an environment for heavy workloads and scaling your unique organization. They also know how to properly define metrics of performance for your specific workflow. This helps them understand when things are working well and when there are issues. They can then quickly and efficiently respond to those issues to ensure performance isn’t impacted.

At Protected Harbor, owning the full stack allows performance metrics to become actionable instead of confusing. We design environments around real workflows, define the right performance signals, and respond before slowdowns turn into business problems.

This same philosophy extends to Service Level Agreements (SLAs). An SLA is an agreement that a certain level of service will be provided by your Managed Service Provider (MSP). While uptime belongs in any agreement, it shouldn’t be the only metric. Responsiveness, latency, capacity under load, and consistency matter because they reflect how work actually gets done — not just whether systems are online.

Protected Harbor’s Dedication

The team at Protected Harbor works hard to ensure each of our clients has a custom deployment shaped around their workflow and built for scale. When we come in, our engineers don’t just tweak your existing deployment. Because of our strict standards, we take the time to understand your current environment, along with your business needs and goals, so we can build your system from scratch. We rebuild environments intentionally — keeping what works and redesigning what doesn’t — rather than patching issues on top of legacy architecture.

We’re also adamant that your data and applications are migrated to our environment. Unlike other IT providers, we own and manage our own infrastructure. This gives us complete control and the ability to offer unmatched reliability, scalability, and security. When issues do arise, our engineers respond to tickets within 15 minutes — not days. This allows us to provide unmatched support; when you call us for help, no matter who you speak to, every technician will know your organization and your system.

Additionally, we utilize in-house monitoring to ensure we’re keeping an eye out for issues in your deployment 24/7. Because our dashboards are tailored to each client’s unique environment, we’re able to spot any issues in your workflow right away. When an issue is spotted, our system will flag it and notify our technicians immediately. This allows our engineers to act fast, preventing bottlenecks and downtime instead of responding after they’ve already happened.

Framework: How Do Throughput & Uptime Impact You?

Throughput and uptime are crucial metrics to pay attention to. They work together to either support or damage business performance. Organizations need environments built around their specific demands and built for scale. They also need a Managed Service Provider who has the expertise and tools required to support a successful environment.

A poorly designed deployment will only get worse as your business tries to grow.  Preventing downtime and throughput issues helps to increase efficiency, bolster productivity, and ensure staff and customers are satisfied — which all combines to equal a positive reputation, supported business growth, and increased profits.

Consider:

• Are you experiencing frequent downtime? — If not, is your throughput adequate?
• What metrics are included in your Service Level Agreement (SLA)? — Do those metrics actually reflect the workflow of your business?
• Are you satisfied with the agreed upon level of service being provided?
• Is your Managed Service Provider effectively meeting the requirements of your SLA? — Are they doing the bare minimum or going above and beyond?

Measuring Performance Where Users Feel It

Why Dashboards Don’t Reflect Real Work

Many organizations rely on their applications to get work done and serve their customers. Have you paid attention to how your application has been performing lately?

Can a user log in without issue?

Do navigation menus load quick enough?

Are users experiencing frequent crashes?

Is downtime frequently a problem?

It can be difficult for businesses to gauge the performance of their systems if they don’t have defined metrics of “good” performance. It’s not good enough that your system turns on and most work can get done, even if it’s a bit slow.

Metrics include:

• Subjective satisfaction
• Operation success rate
• User errors
• Time spent on tasks
• How easy an application or design is to use

However, what do you do when your metrics all look fine, but users are still left frustrated by poor performance?

In general, good performance is when your users don’t feel slowed down by the environment they’re trying to work in. When a user is experiencing a responsive interface, they don’t think about IT because they don’t need to. This is how we know we’ve succeeded. When a user is frustrated and feels like they cannot work because things are crashing or don’t load, this signifies a poorly engineered deployment.

Where Do Users Feel Pain?

Most organizations think they’re measuring performance, but they’re actually just measuring system health — not the workflows where users actually feel friction.

To an engineer, measuring performance may mean looking at disk response, throughput, network latency, bandwidth, CPU/memory, etc. But measuring performance also means paying attention to the specific, repeatable, and measurable tasks that impact users.

For example, what does performance look like when opening an application and clicking a button?

Does the application load within your designated metrics of “good enough” performance? Does it take too long? Does the page crash?

When a user clicks a button to complete a task, does that operation happen within milliseconds? Seconds? Minutes? Do they need to try a couple of times for it to work?

Users feel performance pain inside of their daily workflow. Actions that need to be repeated day to day stand out to users and create friction if those actions can’t be completed without issue.

You may be wondering, what does it mean to measure performance where users feel it? This means ensuring the metrics you’re measuring are tailored to the specific outcomes that matter to your business.

If a dashboard is not customized to the unique workflow of an organization, then health ≠ performance ≠ experience.

Health: Whether the system is working on a basic level — is the system up and running?

Performance: Server vitals, disk performance, network performance — how are the individual pieces of the system operating? How are they working together?

Experience: What is the average user actually feeling?

At a glance, your metrics may seem fine, but if you’re not measuring specific workflows in health and performance, then you’re not getting a clear idea of the user experience. 

Consider a large-scale payroll processing company.

Let’s say all their clients process their payroll concurrently and are experiencing issues. Pages are loading slow and frequently crash. Things aren’t taking minutes to load, but the issues are significant enough to slow down work and frustrate customers. 

When the company starts to receive complaints, they take a look at their dashboard for signs of an issue:

The network connectivity looks fine.

Their software is up to date.

The hardware is operating appropriately.

The usual metrics look fine, so what is the issue?  

Problems with the function of their application persist, so they decide to bring in a Managed Service Provider (MSP). The MSP evaluates their system and discovers the architecture of their system isn’t capable of handling such heavy traffic. During busy times, the application risks grinding to a halt, impacting every customer.

A lack of scaling in the infrastructure and understanding of how to build architecture for speed and growth was contributing to performance issues over time, despite their metrics not reflecting an issue. Meanwhile, performance inconsistency and degradation are reputation damage.

The MSP was able to come in and change the responsiveness and throughput of the architecture with no downtime for their 800 customers. The MSP also instituted bespoke tools for accurate performance monitoring. Customers are now more satisfied with their experience with the organization’s application, bolstering their reputation and profits.

Why Does the User Experience Matter?

If work is happening a bit slow, but still getting done, you might not realize the impact of poor performance if you don’t know how to measure it or your dashboard says everything is fine. You may not even notice there’s an issue until the problem becomes an expensive one. The key is knowing how to measure and monitor performance so you can catch and address issues before they start to cost you.

Measuring metrics of specific application or workflow performance is a common blind spot in performance monitoring. Any solution can look at CPU, memory, or disks, but it requires thought and consideration to build monitoring and define metrics around a customized deployment.

For example, a payroll processing client may measure:

• Transaction latency during peak payroll windows
• Concurrency limits when thousands of employees submit payroll at once
• Queue depth during processing
• Error rates under heavy loads

Their unique deployment needs monitoring build around real payroll workflows, not generic infrastructure health.

Let’s get more specific.

How would we evaluate performance in the context of how long it takes to generate a report on PTO usage for an organization? This company would need a highly available database and web servers to accommodate large changes in request volume.

In this context, a unique metric they need to pay attention to is the amount of time these reports take to generate. This specific workflow wouldn’t be included in a typical dashboard because the lift depends on the organization generating the report, as well as how many users there are.

Instead, we would work with the client to do periodic testing. From the dashboard side, our engineers would specifically look at how responsive the web servers are to incoming requests so that we can understand if they’re slowing down unexpectedly. We also monitor the websites that users are using to log in and generate reports to understand if those websites are behaving unexpectedly slow.

When users become impacted by poor performance, this can significantly hurt your organization in many ways.

Tools aren’t working the way they should à employees lose confidence and implement workarounds

Systems are lagging à work slows and productivity is limited

Work isn’t getting done on time à decisions are delayed

Staff get frustrated  à morale decreases and staff quit

Poor user experience à you’re unable to sell your product to customers

Customers are left unsatisfied by their experience à your reputation and revenue take a hit

Performance and satisfaction are highly correlated — a poor user experience means dissatisfaction with your business.

Performance issues are also expensive in the literal sense.

Maybe your hardware is outdated and needs to be completely replaced with newer equipment capable of meeting the demands of your business.

Maybe your IT team decides to deploy multiple needless products in an attempt to address the symptoms of an issue without searching for a cause.

Maybe increased shadow work puts your company at risk of a ransomware infection, lawsuits, privacy issues, and non-compliance.

Paying attention to the user experience tells you when things are not performing the way they should. It’s also important to appropriately monitor your system for issues so they can be addressed before users feel it.

What If My Metrics Look Fine?

This is the core of the issue. Performance monitoring tools are insufficient unless they’ve been customized to a business’ needs. Your dashboard must be tailored to the specific workflow of your organization. If it’s not, then a green dashboard will tell you if something is running or not, but it will miss workflow-specific delays.

Catching issues specific to your workflow is how you can reduce friction. Otherwise, if you’re not looking at the right metrics, you may not know there’s a problem until it’s too late. Letting performance issues go unaddressed frustrates employees and customers, hurts your reputation, and threatens the profitability and growth of your company. Reliable performance translates to trust in your organization to deliver on its promises.

You may not know that your environment isn’t performing the way it should if you don’t know what to look for. For example, when we talk about an issue like high latency, it’s usually caused by a combination of variables/ system failures. Issues must be spotted early on because users will typically tolerate some slowness. However, that slowness will continue to get worse and by the time users are impacted enough to report it, it’s already too late for an easy solution.

It’s also important to remember how performance issues can seem minor right now, but they can become major disruptions as your company grows. Monitoring general metrics and having a system that can support “good” performance now is one thing, but it’s crucial to have an environment capable of scaling with your business and an efficient monitoring system. Otherwise, user pain will get increasingly worse and growth is extremely limited.

The Protected Harbor Difference

At Protected Harbor, when we come in, our job is to evaluate your current system, identify areas of improvement, and implement the recommended solutions.

We take the time to understand each client’s needs, workflows, and growth goals — and design a custom application built specifically for how your business operates.

Our engineers work hard to create bespoke tools that are designed to match you — not force your organization into a box of general performance metrics.

Dashboards that are specific to the needs of an organization generate metrics that accurately reflect where problems lie. Building an environment for scalability is also crucial for ensuring performance remains steady while your business grows. Our 24/7 in-house monitoring will tell our team when an issue has been spotted, allowing us to act fast to ensure users aren’t impacted. We prioritize a proactive response, not responding to issues after they’ve already caused disruptions to your users and your organization as a whole.

Framework: Are You Measuring Performance Effectively?

Overall, it’s important to pay attention to the user experience because this is a key way to identify if there’s a problem in your deployment. Ideally, issues should be addressed before the user notices, which is why intentional monitoring is crucial.

A dashboard that isn’t customized to your organization will produce metrics that are too general and simply tell you if your system is on — not if the operations that matter most to you are working the way they should. You must pay attention to the specific metrics that are key for the success of your unique organization, and you need a dashboard that can reflect that specificity.

Consider:

• What metrics does your organization use to measure performance? Do those metrics accurately reflect the user experience?
• If your metrics look fine, what frustrations are users still experiencing?
• How is an inadequate user experience costing you?
• What does monitoring look like for your Managed Service Provider? Are issues identified and addressed promptly?