Overview
This article explains availability management as defined in ITIL v4. I will also relate my own experiences to explain the processes involved in availability management.
What is Availability Management?
Availability management involves activities to ensure the availability of a service. The objective of availability management is to ensure that the service delivers an agreed level of availability to meet the needs of customers and users.
Processes in Availability Management
There are two main processes in availability management:
- Establishing Service Availability Control
- Analyzing and Improving Service Availability
Establishing Service Availability Control
Establishing service availability control ensures the availability of a service. It is realized through the following steps:
- Identifying service availability requirements
- Agreeing on service availability requirements
- Deciding on availability measurement requirements
- Designing availability metrics and reporting
Applying my own experiences to these processes, I understood them as follows:
- Identifying service availability requirements
- Identifying the types of users and the business risks of service downtime.
- For my service, which is an internal platform, I identified the impacts on various services using the platform.
- Agreeing on service availability requirements
- Agreeing on the service’s availability (e.g., 99% uptime) in the form of an SLA.
- We also clarified downtime criteria and exceptions for uptime calculations.
- Deciding on availability measurement requirements
- As the availability requirements were agreed upon earlier, there were no specific measurement requirements.
- Designing availability metrics and reporting
- Primarily designed around the ‘downtime/uptime’ formula.
- For reporting, we created a dashboard to visualize the availability metrics.
Analyzing and Improving Service Availability
This process, as the name suggests, involves analyzing and improving service availability. It is realized through the following steps:
- Analyzing service availability
- Reporting on service availability
- Planning and designing for service availability
Applying my own experiences to these processes, I understood them as follows:
- Analyzing service availability
- Confirming that service availability is being achieved and compiling the data.
- Reporting on service availability
- Reflecting availability on a dashboard that is accessible to everyone.
- Planning and designing for service availability
- In case of incidents that affect availability, we formulated plans for prevention of recurrence.