ITIL - Availability Management

Availability Management (AM) ensures that IT services meet agreed availability goals. It also ensures new or changed service meet availability goals and doesn’t affect the existing services.

Availability is expressed as −

(Agreed service time – Down time)/Agreed Service Time

Availability Manager is the process owner of this process.

Objectives

Here are the objectives of Availability Management −

Availability Management Process

Availability Management process is comprises of following key elements −

• Reactive activities
• Proactive activities

Reactive activities

Activities that are involved in operational roles are known as reactive activities. Activities such as monitoring, measuring, analysis and management of all events, incidents and problem involving unavailability come under reactive activities.

Proactive activities

Activities that are involved in design and planning roles are known as proactive activities. Activities such as proactive planning, design & improvement of availability come under proactive activities.

Availability Management process is completed at following two interconnected levels −

• Service availability
• Component availability

Service availability

It deals with availability and unavailability of service and also the impact of component availability and unavailability on service availability.

Component availability

It deals with component availability and unavailability.

Availability Management sub-processes

The following diagram shows sub-processes involved in Availability Management process −

Identifying vital business function (VBF)

VBF refers to business-critical elements that are supported by an IT service. It is important to document all VBFs to provide better business alignment and focus.

Designing for availability

Although additional costs are incurred in providing high availability solution to meet stringent high availability needs yet it is necessary to provide high availability of those services supporting to more critical VBFs.

Service Failure Analysis (SFA)

Service Failure Analysis is designed to −

• Provide structured approach to identifying causes of service interruption to the user.
• Assess where and why shortfalls in availability are occurring.
• Improve overall availability of IT services by producing a set of improvement for implementation or input to Activity Plan.