Availability Management

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Availability Management
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Goal Primary Objective

• To optimise the capability of the IT
  infrastructure and supporting organisations to
  deliver a cost effective and sustained level of
  availability that enables the business to satisfy
  its objectives

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Principles

• Availability is at the core of business end
  user satisfaction
• When things go wrong, it is still possible to
  achieve business end user satisfaction
• Improving availability begins when it is
  understood how IT services integrate with and
  support the business

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Why Availability Management

• To ensure services are available when the
  customer needs them
• Influences
• Business Demand
• Cost required to meet demand
• Complexity of IT Infrastructure
• Levels of Redundancy
• Reliability of the Infrastructure
• Level of Maintenance
• Processes and procedures used by Services
• Human Factors
• Skill sets

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Responsibilities

• Determine availability requirements in business
  terms
• Predict and design for expected levels of
  availability
• Optimise availability through monitoring and
  reporting
• Produce Availability Plan Long term for
  proactive improvement
• Ensure SLAs are met and monitor OLA/UC
  availability obligations
• Manage Service Outage Analysis (SOA)
• Produce and maintain
• - Component Failure Impact Analysis (CFIA)
• - Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)

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Considerations

• Availability
• Reliability
• Maintainability
• Serviceability
• Resilience
• - Related to Resource Capacity Management
• Security
• - Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability (CIA)

Managed through OLAs
Managed through UCs
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ITAMM IT Availability Metrics Model

• Range of metrics and perspectives that should be
  considered when establishing Measurement and
  Reporting
• Measurements need to be meaningful and add value
• Consider WHAT you measure and HOW you report it

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Expanded Incident lifecycle
DOWNTIME or MeanTime To Repair (M)TTR
Incident
Detection
Diagnosis
Repair
Recovery
Restoration
Incident
UPTIME or MeanTime Between Failures (M)TBF
Time between system incidents (M)TBSI
Time
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Calculating Availability

• Availability
• Further considerations
• Components in series or parallel
• Weighting per number of users affected
• Weighting per criticality period

AST - DT
X 100
AST
Measuring Availability
Measurements need to be meaningful and add value
to the IT and business organisation. It would be
necessary to consider both what is measured and
how it is reported
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Benefits

• Services are designed and managed to meet
  specified business availability requirements
• Shortfalls in levels of availability are
  identified and corrective actions taken
• Frequency and duration of IT failures is reduced
• Availability levels are measured to fully support
  Service Level Management
• BUSINESS VALUE!
• Effective Availability Management will influence
  customer satisfaction and determine the perceived
  Reliability of the business on the market

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Exam Tips

• Remember the ABILITY
• RELIABILITY
• MAINTAINABILITY
• SERVICEABILITY
• But NOT VULNERABIILITY (ITSCM)
• CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability)

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Exam Questions

• Availability Management is responsible for ..
• Understanding the reliability of components to
  carry out a required function under given
  conditions over a certain period of time
• The ease with which maintenance (Maintainability)
  of service components can be carried out
• Negotiating availability levels with customers
• Which of these is correct?
• A Only 2 3
• B Only 1 2
• C 1, 2 3
• D Only 1 3
• Note ! 1 is definitely correct and 3 is
  definitely wrong (SLM)
• 2 is disguised!!!!

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Exam Questions

• Percentage availability is calculated as
• A DT 100 C (AST DT) 100-------------
  ----------------------
• AST AST
• B AST 100 D AST-------------
  --------------------- DT (AST DT) 100
• Note! It just is Remember it! Treat it as a
  gift
• (100 20) 100 ------------ 80
  100

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Exam Questions

• In Availability Management terms, what do the
  letters CIA stand for?
• A Component Impact Analysis (ITSCM)
• B Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability
• C Configuration Item Availability
• D Central Intelligence Agency (A contradiction in
  terms)

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Exam Questions

• Managing service availability is now more
  important than ever because
• A The dependence (Reliability prevention of
  failure) of customers on their IT has grown
• B System Management tools can now provide much
  more real time performance management information
• C More IT systems are outsourced
• D More service providers now have Service Level
  Agreements with their customers