Direct cost is only part of it — the reputational damage often outweighs the lost revenue — and in today's hybrid, SaaS-dependent estates fewer than 40% of IT leaders can pinpoint an outage's cause immediately.

Industry surveys consistently put the cost of large-enterprise downtime in the hundreds of millions per year across a sector, but the number that should worry an engineer is a different one: only about 38% of IT leaders can identify the root cause of an outage straight away and correctly. The rest are guessing, or waiting.

The reason is structural. A failing transaction today crosses your own systems, someone else's cloud, and two or three third-party SaaS platforms you cannot log into. Each piece may look healthy in isolation while the transaction as a whole fails, and you have no visibility into most of the path.

That gap is exactly what organisations are buying when they invest in observability platforms (increasingly with machine-learning-assisted analysis): not more dashboards, but the ability to answer which component caused the loss, in minutes rather than days. Reputational damage scales with how long the answer takes.

Go deeper:

• heise: IT-Ausfälle immer teurer für grosse Unternehmen — the news write-up of the downtime-cost study (German).
• Splunk: Der 600-Milliarden-Dollar-Weckruf (press release) — the study itself, including the root-cause-identification figure (German).

RESTCONF is a RESTful HTTP interface to YANG-modelled data. It uses the same YANG models and datastore concepts as NETCONF, but over HTTPS with ordinary HTTP methods, which makes it simpler and web-friendly.

RESTCONF (RFC 8040) keeps what makes NETCONF good, the YANG models and the abstraction from the device, and swaps the transport and message style for something every web developer already knows:

On Cisco IOS XE, both interfaces expose the same YANG models, so the data you get is the same. Only the way you ask for it differs.

Go deeper:

• RFC 8040 — RESTCONF Protocol — the standard, with its URL scheme and methods.