ITIL - Availability Management

Availability Management is the practice of identifying levels of IT Service availability for use in Service Level Reviews with Customers.
All areas of a service must be measurable and defined within the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
To measure service availability the following areas are usually included in the SLA:

• Agreement statistics – such as what is included within the agreed service.
• Availability – agreed service times, response times, etc.
• Help Desk Calls – number of incidents raised, response times, resolution times.
• Contingency – agreed contingency details, location of documentation, contingency site, 3^rd party involvement, etc.
• Capacity – performance timings for online transactions, report production, numbers of users, etc.
• Costing Details – charges for the service, and any penalties should service levels not be met.

Availability is usually calculated based on a model involving the Availability Ratio and techniques such as Fault Tree Analysis, and includes the following elements:

• Serviceability – where a service is provided by a 3^rd party organisation, this is the expected availability of a component.
• Reliability – the time for which a component can be expected to perform under specific conditions without failure.
• Recoverability – the time it should take to restore a component back to its operational state after a failure.
• Maintainability – the ease with which a component can be maintained, which can be both remedial or preventative.
• Resilience – the ability to withstand failure.
• Security – the ability of components to withstand breaches of security.

Some availability measurements, that may be included in SLA:

• Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MTBF): elapsed time between a service gets up and down. It represents relaibility.
• Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR): elapsed time to repair a configuration item or IT service. 
• Mean-Time-Between-System-Incidents (MTBSI): elapes time between detection of two consecutive incidents.
• Mean-Time-To-Restore-Service (MTRS): elapes time from the detection of an incident until it gets up.It represents maintainability.

MTBSI = MTBF + MTRS

Availability = uptime/ (uptime+downtime)    =MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR)

ITIL - Capacity Management

 ITIL Capacity Management aims to ensure that the capacity of IT services and the IT infrastructure is able to deliver the agreed service level targets in a cost effective and timely manner. Capacity Management considers all resources required to deliver the IT service, and plans for short, medium and long term business requirements.

The 3 sub processes of Capacity Management are: 

1. Business Capacity Management
2. Service Capacity Management
3. Component Capacity Management

Let’s take a detailed look at each of these processes.

Business Capacity Management

This sub process translate business needs and plans into capacity and performance requirements for services and IT infrastructure, and to ensure that future capacity and performance needs can be fulfilled. It analyses the Patterns of Business Activity (PBAs) coming from Demand Management. These PBAs show both the volume of work and how this volume fluctuates over time. Business Capacity Management then gathers information about new business activities such as launching a new product, relocating a department or opening a new facility. This may be provided directly from business managers to the Capacity Management team or may come from the Service Level Packages produced for the Service Portfolio. Superimposing forecasts of new activities on top of patterns of current usage helps this sub-process to provide Service Capacity Management with an accurate projection of changing business activities over time.

Service Capacity Management

This sub process manages, control and predict the performance and capacity of operational services. This includes initiating proactive and reactive action to ensure that the performances and capacities of services meet their agreed targets.

It seeks to correlate business activity and service usage. For example, a call center’s usage of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service is probably dependent on the number of customers, how often they call and what information they require. The relationship between these factors and CRM service usage can be mapped or modeled so that the impact of business activity changes can be predicted in terms of service performance (e.g. transaction response times) over time.

Component Capacity Management

This sub process manages, control and predict the performance, utilization and capacity of IT resources and individual IT components.

When Service Capacity Management identifies that service levels will fall below target, Component Capacity Management is the sub-process responsible for identifying the necessary changes to the technical infrastructure to maintain service levels. To be effective fully, configuration information is necessary to understand which components (configuration items) support which services. The utilization of these components should be continually monitored against their capacity and, ideally, an alert generated when a threshold is reached that could cause service levels to be missed.

Service Level Agreement

A Service Level Agreement is an agreement between an IT Service provider and a customer. Particular aspects of the service - scope, quality, responsibilities - are agreed between the service provider and the service user.

An SLA  document consist of

An introduction to the SLA, what does this agreement propose

A Service description, what service this SLA supports and details of the service

Mutual responsibilities, who’s responsible for what part of the service

Scope of SLA.

Applicable service hours, from what time till what time is the service available according to the agreement

Service availability, how much is the service available during the service window and outside of service window

Reliability.

Customer support arrangements.

Contact points & escalation, a communication matrix

Service performance.

Security.

Costs and charging method used.

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Service level agreements are also defined at different levels:

• Customer-based SLA: An agreement with an individual customer group, covering all the services they use. For example, an SLA between a supplier (IT service provider) and the finance department of a large organization for the services such as finance system, payroll system, billing system, procurement/purchase system, etc.

• Service-based SLA: An agreement for all customers using the services being delivered by the service provider. For example:
• A car service station offers a routine service to all the customers and offers certain maintenance as a part of offer with the universal charging.
• A mobile service provider offers a routine service to all the customers and offers certain maintenance as a part of offer with the universal charging
• An email system for the entire organization. There are chances of difficulties arising in this type of SLA as level of the services being offered may vary for different customers (for example, head office staff may use high-speed LAN connections while local offices may have to use a lower speed leased line).

• Multilevel SLA: The SLA is split into the different levels, each addressing different set of customers for the same services, in the same SLA.
• Corporate-level SLA: Covering all the generic service level management (often abbreviated as SLM) issues appropriate to every customer throughout the organization. These issues are likely to be less volatile and so updates (SLA reviews) are less frequently required.
• Customer-level SLA: covering all SLM issues relevant to the particular customer group, regardless of the services being used.
• Service-level SLA: covering all SLM issue relevant to the specific services, in relation to this specific customer group.

The four P's of Service Design

When planning a service, a service designer needs to consider the four P’s:

1. People: People are in charge of providing IT services. These professionals should have the skills and competencies required for providing services.
2. Products: The products are the tools, services, and technology used in the delivery of, and support of, the services.
3. Processes: Processes support and manage the services being offered so that the services meet customer expectations and agreed service levels.  All processes must be measureable.
4. Partners: When designing services, vendors, manufacturers, and suppliers should be considered as they will be utilized to support the service once it is live.

ITIL - Service Catalogue Management

Purpose

The purpose of the Service Catalog Management process is to provide and maintain a single source of consistent information on all operational services and those being prepared to be run operationally, and to ensure that it is widely available to those who are authorized to access it.

 Objectives of Service Catalog Management

The objectives of the Service Catalog Management process are to:

• Manage the information contained within the Service Catalog and to ensure that it is accurate and current
• Ensure that the service catalog is made available to those approved to access it in a manner that supports their effective and efficient use.

Scope

The scope of the Service Catalog Management process is to provide and maintain accurate information on all services that are being transitioned or have been transitioned to the live environment.

Service Catalog structure

The structure and presentation of the service catalog should support the uses to which it will be put, taking into consideration the different audiences. Many organizations integrate and maintain their service portfolio and service catalog as a part of their Configuration Management System (CMS). It is therefore essential that changes within the service portfolio and its constituent service catalog are subject to the change management process.

 Service Catalog Presentations

 Service Catalog with two views

• Business/Customer Service Catalog view: This contains details of all the IT services delivered to the customers, together with relationships to the business units and the business processes that rely on IT services. This is the customer view of the service catalog. This is the service catalog for the business to see and use.
• Technical/Supporting Service Catalog view: This contains details of all the supporting IT services, together with relationships to the customer-facing services they underpin, and the components, Configuration Items and other supporting services. 

Service Catalog with three views

• Wholesale customer view: This contains details of all the IT services delivered to wholesale customers.
• Retail customer view: This contains details of all the IT services delivered to retail customers.
• Supporting services view: This contains details of all the supporting IT services, together with relationships to the customer-facing services.

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