Uptime Institute Outage Severity Rating
The Outage Severity Rating (OSR) was developed by Uptime Institute to help the infrastructure industry better distinguish between a service outage that threatens to impact the business and an inconvenient outage that has little or no impact to the business.
For the past three years, Uptime Institute's Intelligence group has been studying publicly reported outages to understand what has been causing unplanned downtime and the effects of these outages. During the period, the number of outages has steadily climbed, with 27 outages in 2016; 57 outages in 2017, and 78 outages in 2018.
Uptime Institute’s OSR will help the digital infrastructure and data center community better understand and articulate service outages in the context of how each incident affects the business.
With the OSR, infrastructure practitioners can finally share a common lexicon when forming their own service delivery capacity strategies and can view their own outages in terms of business impacts, rather than referencing outages based upon the number of physical infrastructure components that were involved.
Questions about the Outage Severity Rating?
A Metric to Classify the Severity and Impact of Outages
Although there are various ways to categorize the "mission criticality" of various systems as a planning tool for disaster recovery and availability/redundancy investments, there is no "Richter Scale" for measuring the severity/impact of outages.
Such a rating is clearly useful. For example, the effect of losing access to a human resources system for two weeks might be frustrating but negligible, even in large organizations, while a 5-minute loss of a currency trading system can be near catastrophic.
For classifying the impact of public outages, Uptime Institute has created a five-level Outage Severity Rating as outlined below.
