ITIL Availability Management

What is it?

Availability Management is one of five components in the ITIL Service Delivery area. It is responsible for ensuring application systems are up and available for use according to the conditions of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

The Availability Management team reviews business process availability requirements and ensures the most cost effective contingency plans are put in place and tested on a regular basis to ensure business needs are met. For example, Internet applications supporting online ordering systems may have 30-minute or less recovery requirements, so they may be provisioned with infrastructure components providing several levels of redundancy. Less critical, non-customer-facing applications used by a few users in small offices with a 5-day recovery period may be provisioned on less expensive infrastructure with limited redundancy capabilities.

Availability Management is also the lead in Component Failure Impact Analysis and Service Outage Analysis initiatives, determining cause, analyzing trends and taking any appropriate actions to ensure service availability meets SLAs.

Availability Management activities include:

• Ensuring service availability meets SLAs
• Determining the cause of availability failures
• Reviewing business requirements for availability of business systems
• Cataloging business requirements
• Ensuring proper contingency plans are in place and tested
• Establishing high-availability, redundant systems to support mission-critical applications

Why should I implement Availability Management?

Benefits to implementing Availability Management processes include:

• Services are available for use during expected timeframes as specified in SLAs.
• Services are provisioned on specific infrastructure depending upon their availability needs. This avoids unnecessary costs due to provisioning services with longer recovery times on more expensive high-availability platforms.
• Potential service availability issues are identified and corrected before they negatively impact services.

Availability Management processes are tightly integrated with Service Level Management, Capacity Management, IT Service Continuity Management, and Incident Management.

TeamQuest Addresses ITIL Availability Management

TeamQuest directly supports ITIL Availability Management processes by improving your ability to meet availability requirements. TeamQuest Model allows you to run multiple scenarios to show business units the impact of various availability management decisions, helping to determine the optimal performance levels needed to meet business unit goals while ensuring that these metrics can be tracked and reported on an ongoing basis.

TeamQuest Alert allows you to monitor availability metrics of a large number of systems through color indicators. TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer provides detailed diagnostic capabilities to quickly determine the probable cause of an outage, and more importantly, how to keep the problem from recurring. TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer also captures historical data for trend reporting, allowing IT to proactively predict potential issues and address them before they become problems.

TeamQuest IT Service Reporter automatically publishes reports containing availability metrics. You can customize availability reports for different audiences by organizing and annotating them, choosing appropriate charts and graphs, adding a corporate logo, and arranging it all with appropriate explanations and labeling.

TeamQuest tools support Availability Management by:

• Gathering historical and real-time data on service performance
• Providing the performance data required to make informed decisions regarding IT's ability to meet SLAs
• Allowing you to experiment with multiple scenarios to determine resources needed to meet business unit goals
• Determining the cause of outages
• Preventing availability problems from recurring
• Proactively identifying potential availability issues so they can be resolved before they impact users
• Tracking and reporting availability metrics on an ongoing basis

Implementing ITIL? Contact TeamQuest