What does detection lag cost?
Slow monitoring has a hidden cost: the revenue that bleeds out before your monitor even notices an outage. Estimate it, and see how much 1-second checks contain.
Worst-case detection lag at 5m
$12
Revenue exposed before a monitor at this interval even notices.
With 1-second checks
$0
Detection-lag exposure drops by about $12 per incident.
Estimate only. Models the worst-case revenue exposed during the detection-lag window (one full check interval) for a single incident, assuming evenly distributed revenue. Actual impact depends on traffic patterns, incident timing, and severity.
The cost of downtime
Downtime cost is highly business-specific, but the headline benchmark is striking: Gartner’s widely cited estimate puts the average cost of IT downtime at about $5,600 per minute— roughly $336,000 per hour— with figures ranging from around $2,300 to $9,000 per minute depending on company size and industry, according to Atlassian’s cost-of-downtime guide. Those are averages across large organisations; the calculator above uses your own revenue so the estimate reflects your business rather than someone else’s.
The hidden cost is detection lag
Most outage-cost conversations focus on the total length of an incident, but a large slice of it is avoidable: the detection lag, the time before your monitor even notices something is wrong. A monitor that checks every 5 minutes can let an outage run for almost the full interval before the first failed check — and revenue is lost the entire time. Cutting the check interval cuts that window almost to zero.
Worked example
Take a service earning $100,000 a month. Spread evenly, that is about $0.039 per second. With a 5-minute (300-second) check interval, the worst-case detection-lag window exposes roughly $11.60 per incident before monitoring even reacts. With 1-second checks, that exposure drops to about $0.04— the detection-lag cost all but disappears. Detection speed does not prevent the outage, but it removes the part of the loss that slow monitoring quietly adds on top.
Frequently asked questions
- What does an hour of downtime cost?
- It varies enormously by business. Gartner's widely cited average is about $5,600 per minute — roughly $336,000 per hour — though figures range from around $2,300 to $9,000 per minute depending on company size and industry (via Atlassian's cost-of-downtime guide). The calculator above uses your own revenue for a grounded, company-specific estimate instead of an industry average.
- What is detection lag and why does it matter?
- Detection lag is the time between an outage starting and your monitor noticing it. With a 5-minute check interval, an outage can run for almost 5 minutes before the first failed check — and revenue bleeds out the entire time. Faster check intervals shrink that window directly.
- How does this calculator estimate the cost?
- It spreads your monthly revenue evenly across the month to get a per-second rate, then multiplies that by the worst-case detection-lag window (one full check interval). It is a deliberately simple, worst-case estimate for a single incident — not a forecast of total outage cost.
- Will faster checks really reduce downtime cost?
- Faster detection does not prevent outages, but it caps the detection-lag portion of every incident. Moving from 5-minute to 1-second checks removes almost the entire lag window. Your total impact still depends on how quickly you then recover.
Pair this with the uptime / SLA calculator or read why second-by-second detection matters.