The earliest reference to the term “Mean Time to Innocence” in a Google search was in 2007 on the Professor Messer training site. By 2012, there were about 50 search results. While definitely not a scientific study, over the last two years, over 100 new online mentions of this term appear as it gains popularity with companies like NetScout, Gigamon, Riverbed, and yes, Uplogix.
We’ve been talking about the capabilities of the Uplogix out-of-band platform for combating MTTI since 2009 when we did some work with Dr. Jim Metzler, who described it in an article for NetworkWorld, stating:
One of the most prevalent pieces of conventional wisdom that impacts virtually all IT organizations is that the cause of application degradation invariably is the wide area network. This piece of conventional wisdom leads to a new management metric – the mean time to innocence (MTTI). The MTTI is how long it takes for the networking organization to prove it is not the network causing the degradation. Once that task is accomplished, it is common to assume some other component of IT such as the servers must be at fault. This defensive (a.k.a., CYA) approach to troubleshooting elongates the time it takes to resolve application degradation issues. One CIO that we spoke with said he is tired of the five guys who report to him coming to him with reports showing that their component of IT is running well, and yet their Web site is performing so badly that they are having trouble booking sales orders. He stated “I don’t care where the fault is, I just want them to fix it.”
A more recent NetworkWorld article shows how MTTI is only growing more important and difficult to reduce as companies grapple with an increasingly distributed landscape of ISPs, SaaS providers, and other cloud-based services that, combined with the LAN, make it tough to answer the typical user complaint that some system is down or slow.
Uplogix continues to cut MTTI with a combination of out-of-band access that not only gets you into remote gear when the network is down or degraded, but also delivering data to your key dashboard systems allowing you to know exactly what is happening. WAN Traffic Failover goes the extra step of keeping traffic moving over the out-of-band connection so users stay happy. Then there is the automation. With the ability to take initial recovery steps for the most common issues with network infrastructure, often, Uplogix can fix an internal problem before you even knew it was there. After all, the best finger pointing, is no finger pointing.
