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ITServiceManagement:AGuideforITILFoundationExamCandidates,SecondEdition
to assist with the investigation and resolution of availability-related incidents and problems;
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ITServiceManagement:AGuideforITILFoundationExamCandidates,SecondEdition
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ITServiceManagement:AGuideforITILFoundationExamCandidates,SecondEdition
eliminating the sources of service failures. One of these is the availability plan, wherein availability management identifies
and costs the requirements for new and upgraded resources necessary to deliver the required levels of availability. The
availability plan will also include an assessment of the risks of service interruption and failure and appropriate actions
necessary to mitigate those risks.
Risk analysis and management are important across IT service management, especially in processes and activities that
concern service availability. These include availability management, security management and IT service continuity
management, which is covered in the next chapter where a fuller discussion of risk analysis and management is included.
Another technique is to assess the impact of requests for change (RFCs) to understand their potential to interrupt services
and find ways to prevent this occurring.
Other proactive techniques include advising on cost-effective new technology to improve availability and providing advice
and guidance to other areas of IT and the business on all availability-related aspects.
REACTIVE AVAILABILITY MANAGEMENT
On a reactive basis, availability management helps incident and problem management to diagnose and resolve availabilityrelated incidents and problems. Of course, the understanding gained from the resolution of such problems can often
contribute to proactive initiatives to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
Availability management also monitors, measures, reports and reviews service and component availability to ensure that
service levels continue to be met and respond to any outages or potential service level breaches. In this respect, there is a
link to the event management process.
RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER SERVICE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES
Service asset and configuration management
Availability management is heavily reliant on service asset and configuration management to identify the components used
in delivering a service, their relationship with one another and their technical specifications.
IT service continuity management
Availability management is closely related to IT service continuity management because invoking a continuity plan is simply
another form of maintaining the availability of services in extreme situations. Both processes need to identify vital business
functions and use risk management techniques to define appropriate responses.
Capacity management
Availability management is supported by capacity management because a shortage of capacity in a resource or service
can impact availability.
Access management and information security management
Access management and information security management are both concerned with preventing unauthorised access and
permitting authorised access. Availability of a service depends on the ability of the user to access the service and negotiate
the security controls according to their authority.
Change management and release and deployment management
Change management as well as release and deployment management must ensure that availability management is aware
of planned changes and their potential to impact on the availability of services.
Service level management
Availability management supports service level management by managing the IT resources to meet cost-effectively agreed
service levels and by contributing to the design of new and changed services to ensure the appropriate levels of availability
are built-in.
Event, incident and problem management
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Reactively, availability management takes feeds from event management to warn of actual and impending failures and
supports incident and problem management in the diagnosis and resolution of availability-related incidents and problems.
METRICS
There are a number of measures used to assess and report the performance of a service or component in respect of it
being available.
Availability is defined as the ability of a service or component to perform its required function when needed. It is usually
calculated as a percentage:
Maintainability is a measure of how quickly a service or component can be restored to its working state after a failure. It is
usually calculated as:
(N.B. Availability, reliability and maintainability measures all need to include a time interval, typically hours.)
Serviceability is a measure of a third-party provider's ability to meet their contracted support commitments in terms of
availability, reliability and maintainability.
Each of these measures is subject to scrutiny and appropriate actions by availability management in order to minimise
interruptions to services and service outages both proactively and reactively. The extent to which a service is vital to the
business will determine the level of availability and resilience applied. Those business functions considered very important
are known as vital business functions (VBFs) and it is these on which availability management will be most focused.
In relation to the expanded incident lifecycle, the following metrics are useful:
n
ROLES
The availability manager is responsible for ensuring that the purpose and objectives of the process are met.
Responsibilities include:
n
ensuring service levels in respect of availability are met for all current and new services;
ensuring that appropriate CIs and services are monitored for availability through event management;
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attending change advisory board (CAB) meetings as required and assessing requests for change for their impact on
availability.
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