How Aiven monitors your system performance

SELECT 1; isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As a test of verifying database availability, connecting to it and running one simple query is hardly a realistic workload. This simple operation can succeed while the server’s underlying disk system is having serious issues, or if backups have not been generated on schedule. In short, the database can respond to simple queries just fine but your service could still be down.

Aiven commits to 99.99% uptime, but we don’t calculate that figure based on simple availability checks. We believe our customers deserve better guarantees.

What Aiven does is use the output from availability checks to trigger automatic recovery actions. If those actions fail to restore normal service, an on-call ops team member is alerted to investigate and resolve the issue.

This is where our SLA monitoring calculations come in. Whether we are alerted to a problem by our own systems or by our customers, we always investigate every issue as a potential availability breach. If the issue has an unavailability component that is under our responsibility, the customer is remunerated without delay.

But we don’t just stop there. Regardless of where the problem originates, our systems or elsewhere, we’ll do our best to get it fixed. If the issue is somewhere out of our reach, we help you to fix it or to get it fixed by the relevant party.

On the prevention side, we automatically detect and heal a large number of issues before they cause services to fail. Many of the issues we monitor are actually outside our SLA, too, such as cloud provider outages. Our job is to make sure that any outage impacts your services as little as possible. And if we detect an issue that is covered by our SLA, we proactively compensate our customers for any downtime.

If you want to keep a closer eye on the status of Aiven services, you’re welcome to subscribe to our Aiven Status page. There you can find the current and historical system performance information, whether or not it affects your own services. And if you get an e-mail from us about an availability issue, don’t be alarmed. We probably just found something that has affected your service and want to let you know--and give you some service credits!

And remember, Aiven’s highly rated customer service is always happy to help you troubleshoot issues and outages related to our services. We can walk you through possible solutions and even help you prevent future problems.

So far our customers have found this approach valuable, judging from reviews like this on G2:

"If you need a professional support [team], Aiven is ahead of others." (Director of Engineering)

"What I like about Aiven is their support. They are answering really quickly and they help even if the problem is not Aiven related, I learned a lot of things from them (like pgbouncer) and I’m looking forward to working with them even more." (Devops Specialist)

"The technical reliability with Aiven is fantastic. In the rare case that something does go wrong, one can count on Aiven putting their best foot forward in support situations." (Chief Software Architect)

Wrapping up

Rest assured: If anything goes wrong, we may well be the first to tell you about it so we can fix it with you. And if we can fix it at our end, we’ll simply go ahead and do it. Aiven has your back!

Not using Aiven services yet? Sign up now for your free trial at https://console.aiven.io/signup!

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