Availability Management Process

Program: ITIL
Project: ITIL Uplift

Date Issued
Version No. 1.0
Status Draft
Approved
Prepared By
Security Classification Confidential

Table of Contents

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Document Control.................................................................................................................................................... 3
1. Introduction........................................................................................................................................................ 4
1.1 Purpose....................................................................................................................................................... 4
1.2 Scope.......................................................................................................................................................... 4
2. Availability Management Overview.................................................................................................................. 4
2.1 Measurements of Availability Management.................................................................................................5
2.2 Achieving High Availability.......................................................................................................................... 6
2.3 Value of Availability Management............................................................................................................... 6
2.4 Process Activities of Availability Management............................................................................................7
2.5 Risks of Availability Management............................................................................................................... 7
3. Input / Entry Criteria.......................................................................................................................................... 7
4. Output / Exit Criteria.......................................................................................................................................... 7
5. Availability Management High Level Process Flow........................................................................................8
5.1 Reactive activities....................................................................................................................................... 8
5.2 Proactive activities...................................................................................................................................... 8
6. Roles and Responsibility.................................................................................................................................. 9
7. Availability Management Detailed Process Flow.......................................................................................... 10
8. Assumptions.................................................................................................................................................... 10
9. Exceptions....................................................................................................................................................... 10
10. Metrics......................................................................................................................................................... 10
11. Relationships.............................................................................................................................................. 10

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Document Control
Revision History

Version Author Issue Date Changes

1.0 Suresh Rajamani

Distribution List

Name Title Business Unit Responsibility

Document Approval

Name Title Business Unit Approval

Action Items as discussed in review sessions (I, II & III)

# Action Item PIC Due Date

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 1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose
This document will serve as the official process of Availability Management for AUSIEX. This
document will introduce a Process Framework and will document the workflow, roles,
procedures, and policies needed to implement a high-quality process and ensure that the
processes are effective in supporting the business. This document should be analyzed and
assessed on a regular basis for continual improvement.

1.2 Scope
The scope of this document is to define the Availability Management Process and process inputs
from and outputs to other process areas. Other service management areas are detailed in
separate documentation. This document includes the necessary components of the Process that
have been confirmed for the organization.

2. Availability Management Overview

The purpose of the Availability management practice is to ensure that services deliver agreed
levels of availability to meet the needs of customers and users. Availability is the ability of an
IT service or other configuration item to perform its agreed function when required.

Availability management activities include:

 Negotiating and agreeing achievable targets for availability
 Designing infrastructure and applications that can deliver required availability levels
 ensuring that services and components are able to collect the data required to measure
availability
 Monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on availability
 Planning improvements to availability

The availability of a service is often expressed as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean
Time to Restore Service (MTRS)

 MTBF measures how frequently the service fails

o Ex: a service with a MTBF of four weeks, on average, 13 times each year.

 MTRS measures how quickly service is restored after a failure

o Ex: a service with a MTRS of four hours will, on average, fully recover from failure
in four hours. This does not mean that service will always be restored in four
hours, as MTRS is an average over many incidents.

Older services were often designed with very high MTBF, so that they would fail infrequently.
More recently there has been a shift towards optimizing service design to minimize MTRS, so
that services can be recovered very quickly. The most effective way to do this is to design anti-

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 fragile solutions, which recover automatically and very quickly, with virtually no business
impact. For some services, even a very short failure can be catastrophic, and for these it is more
important to focus on increasing MTBF.

The way that availability is defined must be appropriate for each service. It is important to
understand users’ and customers’ views on availability and to define appropriate metrics,
reports, and dashboards. Many organizations calculate percentage availability based on MTBF
and MTRS, but these percentage figures rarely match customers’ experience, and are not
appropriate for most services. Other things that should be considered include:
 which vital business functions are affected by different application failures
 at what point is slow performance so bad that the service is effectively unusable
 When does the service need to be available, and when can the service provider carry out
maintenance activities.

2.1 Measurements of Availability Management

 User outage minutes: User outage minutes is calculated by multiplying incident duration
by the number of users impacted, or by adding up the number of minutes each user is
affected. This works well for services that directly support user productivity; for example,
an email service.

 Number of lost transactions: Number of lost transactions is calculated by subtracting the

number of transactions from the number expected to have happened during the time

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 period. This works well for services that support transaction-based business processes,
such as manufacturing support.

 Lost business value: Lost business value is calculated by measuring how business
productivity was impacted by the failures of supporting services. This is easily understood
by customers and can be useful for planning investment in improved availability.
However, it can be difficult to identify which lost business value was caused by IT service
failures and which had other causes.

 User satisfaction: User satisfaction service availability is one of the most important and
visible characteristics of services, and has a great influence on user satisfaction. It is
important to make sure that users are satisfied with service availability in addition to
meeting formally agreed availability targets.

2.2 Achieving High Availability

Below are the important points to achieve the high availability of the services
 Service Level Agreement
 Cost, measurement and availability models
 Several architectural patterns
 Key goal indicators
o Maximize or extend service uptime
o Eliminate or minimize service related incidents
o Minimize unplanned downtime
o Minimize planned downtime

2.3 Value of Availability Management

Service availability is the main factor in customer satisfaction and the success of the business. If
a customer is dissatisfied with the availability of IT services, it can result in loss of business to
competitors. The following benefits are provided by availability management:

 It ensures that the availability of services matches the present and future needs of the
business
 It makes sure that the impact of unavailability of any IT service is minimized
 A single point of accountability for availability is created in the organization
 Cost justification is provided for the levels of service availability provided
 The IT availability requirements, which are determined by the business, can be used to
design the IT services

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  The shortfalls in providing the required levels of availability can be recognized easily,
and the necessary actions can be taken to correct them
 The frequency of IT service failures and their duration is reduced

2.4 Process Activities of Availability Management

The key activities performed by availability management are:

 To determine the availability requirements from the business

 Monitor, measure, analyze, report, and review the availability of services and
components
 To perform an unavailability analysis that investigates all the events, incidents, and
problems that involve unavailability. Necessary corrective actions are taken after this
 Perform a service failure analysis where the underlying causes for service interruption
are identified
 To identify the vital business functions and design for availability and recovery.
 Perform component failure impact analysis (CFIA), single point of failure analysis
(SPOF), and fault tree analysis (FTA)
 To create models to determine whether the new models will meet the stated
requirements

2.5 Risks of Availability Management

Availability management encounters the following risks:

 Lack of specific availability management tools which are required to support the
process
 Lack of commitment from the business to the process of availability management
 Reporting processes that are too labor-intensive
 Excess focuses on the technology and not on the needs and services of the business
 Lack of specific resources with the necessary skills to establish availability
management

3. Input / Entry Criteria

The process of availability management requires a number of inputs as listed below (but not
limited) in order to be able to function effectively.

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 4. Output / Exit Criteria
The following outputs are generated by the process:

5. Availability Management High Level Process Flow

Availability Management process is comprises of two key elements Reactive activities and
Proactive activities.

5.1 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.

5.2 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: It involves all the aspects of service availability and the actual or
potential service impact that component availability can create.
 Component availability: It involved all the aspects of component availability.

Service Component
Availability Availability

The following important concepts are the main focus of availability management as they
influence the overall availability and the perception of unavailability in the business.
 Availability: The ability of a service, component, or configuration item to perform its
agreed function when required is called availability.

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  Reliability: A measure of how long a service, component, or configuration item can
perform its agreed-upon function without any interruptions is called reliability.

 Maintainability: A measure of how quickly and effectively a service, component, or

configuration item can be restored to normal service after experiencing a failure is called
maintainability.

 Serviceability: The ability of a third-party supplier to meet the agreed-upon terms of the
contract, which includes agreed levels of availability, reliability, and maintainability, are
called serviceability.

6. Roles and Responsibility

The following table illustrates the Responsibility, Accountability, Consulted and Informed (RACI)
matrix related to the key Problem Management Activities:

# Activity

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7. Availability Management Detailed Process Flow

8. Assumptions
 Availability Management practices covers only the production environment

9. Exceptions

10. Metrics
Title Description

11. Relationships
Availability Management has relationships with other ITIL processes listed below. It is important
for the success of not only Problem Management but of enterprise wide ITIL processes that
these relationships are appropriately managed.

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  Incident Management
 Change Management
 Capacity Management
 Service Level Management

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