outage/maintenance window opinion

Mon Mar 28 17:30:43 UTC 2005

My opinion:

For the customer, the outage starts when their service stops working* and
ends when their service starts working again. Your goal should be to make
that all happen during the maintenance window. If it doesn't, then the part
that was during the window is "planned outage" and the part that wasn't is
"unplanned outage".

Good ISPs have good explanations for, and sometimes even monetary credit,
for "unplanned outages". "Planned outages" can simply be explained by
pointing at the announced maintenance interval policy.

Matthew Kaufman
matthew at eeph.com

*Note that this can be different times for different customers, and "stops
working" means different things to different people... Some customers are
unhappy if their traffic is taking the slightly longer alternate path,
others are happy as long as they can reach CNN, even if the rest of the net
disappears.