The purpose of Availability Management is to match the availability of the IT services against the current and future identified needs of the business or to exceed them. Availability Management enhances the availability of services by planning long-term service availability, measuring and monitoring service availability, and formulating service availability design criteria that meet requirements.

Read the Availability Management Key Concepts.

Important links

• Availability Management Tool Mentors
• Tivoli® Open Process Automation Library Extensions for Availability Management

Outcomes

As a result of the successful implementation of the Availability Management process:

• IT infrastructure provides a consistent level of availability that enables the business to meet its current and future objectives
• Availability related incidents and problems are minimized
• The provided level of availability is cost justified and optimized

Scope

ITIL® defines components of availability to be:

• reliability
• maintainability
• serviceability

Includes

• Availability needs and requirements
• Identification of capabilities needed to meet requirements
• New and existing IT services
• Ensuring that availability provision of underlying services and suppliers in support of primary IT services is factored in
• Considering all aspects of IT service delivery and support that could impact availability (training, tools)

Excludes

• Business Continuity Management or disaster recovery (Business responsibility along with IT Service Continuity Management)
• Direct handling of service failures (Incident Management)
• Approval of capabilities needed to meet requirements (Portfolio Management)
• Creation of capabilities needed to meet requirements (Realization category of processes)
• Managing suppliers (Supplier Management)

Key performance indicators

• Number of agreed upon service level agreements (SLA) and operations level agreements (OLA) with availability metrics
• Percent of SLA and OLA availability metrics that can be proactively maintained through automatic recovery actions
• Percent of IT resource usage covered by SLA and OLA with availability metrics
• Customer satisfaction with SLA and OLA availability parameters and attainment
• Percent of SLA and OLA availability parameters attained
• Percent of SLA and OLA availability parameters clearly prioritized based on the value of the service or agreement
• Value of SLA and OLA availability parameters attained versus not attained
• Accuracy of attainment projections throughout period
• Percent improvement in service availability
• Percent reduction in service unavailability
• Percent improvement in mean time between failures
• The elapsed time and direct costs:
  • In this process domain
  • In each process step and between steps

Relation to other processes

• Availability Management often provides assessments of proposed change requests for Change Management workflow.
• Incident Management and Problem Management both provide information to help Availability Management understand the reasons for resource unavailability. Service level breaches that affect availability may be inputs from Incident Management or Event Management.  
• Availability Management creates availability targets for service level agreements in Service Level Management and also provides reports to support service reviews. Updates to SLAs, OLAs, and UCs may also affect service availability. 
• Service capacities managed via Capacity Management may have a perceived effect on service availability. 
• The availability of services in the event of a major outage is handled via IT Service Continuity Management.  

For more information

For more information, see Availability Management in the ITIL documentation. 

Also, see the IBM® Service Management Web page.