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Availability management
ITIL® 4 Practice Guide

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24th
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2020
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Contents

1 About this document 3

2 General information 4
3 Value streams and processes 16
4 Organizations and people 22
5 Information and technology 26
6 Partners and suppliers 28
7 Important reminder 29
8 Acknowledgments 30

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1 About this document

This document provides practical guidance for the service continuity management practice. It is
split into five main sections, covering:
● general information about the practice
● the practice’s processes and activities and their roles in the service value chain
● the organizations and people involved in the practice
● the information and technology supporting the practice
● considerations for partners and suppliers for the practice.

1.1 ITIL® 4 QUALIFICATION SCHEME

Selected content of this document is examinable as a part of the following syllabus:

● ITIL Specialist High-velocity IT

Please refer to the respective syllabus document for details.

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2 General information
2.1 PURPOSE AND DESCRIPTION

Key message
The purpose of the availability management practice is to ensure that services deliver the
agreed levels of availability to meet the needs of customers and users.

The availability management practice ensures that requirements for the availability of services and
resources are understood and fulfilled efficiently and in line with the organization’s strategy and
commitments. To enable this, this practice is applied throughout the organization’s product and
service lifecycle, from ideation to operations.
This practice is extremely important when products and services are planned and designed;
decisions made at this stage will affect availability levels and related constraints, as well as the
organization’s ability to monitor and manage these aspects.
Availability is an important service characteristic from the consumers’ perspective, and therefore
it is subject to negotiation, agreement, monitoring, and reporting. These activities involve
multiple practices (including the business analysis, relationship management, service design,
service level management (SLM), and measurement and reporting practices, among others), and
the availability management practice is used in conjunction with those to ensure that availability
is sufficiently and consistently addressed.
Definition: Availability

The ability of an IT service or other configuration item to perform its agreed function
when required.

Theoretically, availability is simple to measure and understand; it depends on how frequently the
service fails and how quickly it recovers after a failure. These characteristics are often expressed
as mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean time to restore service (MTRS):
● MTBF measures how frequently the service fails. For example, on average, a service with a
MTBF of four weeks fails 13 times each year.

● MTRS measures how quickly service is restored after a failure. For example, on average, a
service with a MTRS of four hours will fully recover from failure in four hours.

In practice, availability is a complex characteristic. To be measured and understood, multiple

measurements and agreements about how these measurements should be understood in the
context of a service are needed. Availability depends on the service architecture, importance of
certain service components or service actions, criteria of unavailability, service hours, and other
parameters.
Availability from the perspective of a user or a group of users can be different from the availability
measured from the provider’s or customer’s perspective. For example, a service that is
unavailable to five users in a group of 200 will be perceived by the five as interrupted, but the
agreed availability targets for the group may still be met.
The availability management practice should ensure a transparent, consistent, and practical
understanding of availability (expected, agreed, designed, and actual) among all relevant parties.
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When a service is provided to thousands or even millions of people, there is not usually a single
generic availability agreement with customers, but the overall service availability is critical for the
service provider. Such services are usually designed for high availability, where reliability (high
MTBF) is balanced with fast recovery (short MTRS).
Availability is closely connected to service performance, capacity, continuity, and information
security. The ITIL management practice guides that discuss these areas often address the same
characteristics of configuration items and services, but focus on different aspects of their quality.
These practices can significantly benefit from sharing resources of all four dimensions of service
management; however, clear separation of responsibilities is required in some cases, especially in
heavily regulated areas, such as service continuity and information security.

2.2 TERMS AND CONCEPTS

Service availability is central to business success, there is a direct correlation between service
availability and customer and user satisfaction. However, it is possible to achieve customer
satisfaction when services fail. The way in which a service provider reacts in a failed situation has
a major influence on customer perception.
It is difficult to improve availability without understanding how the services support the consumer.

2.2.1 Vital business function

Vital business function (VBF) is a term used to reflect the part of a service that is critical to the
organization’s success. A service may also support a number of business functions that are not
vital.
For example, an e-mail service’s VBFs would be sending and receiving email, and accessing
archived messages. The ability to access a calendar may not be vital.
This distinction between vital and non-vital functions is important and should influence availability
design and associated costs. Generally, the more vital the business function, the more resilient
and available it needs to be.

2.2.2 Availability for different types of services

Availability can be defined differently for different types of service offerings. For example, if the
service offering:
● Enables business operations (such as a loan approval process or financial reporting process),
availability is normally defined in terms of the execution of business operations.

● Provides access to a resource (such as network, print, or email services), availability is defined
and measured in terms of resource availability.

● Includes fulfilment actions (such as user support), availability is often not an applicable
measure. Instead, the focus should be on timely request completion.

2.2.3 Availability criteria

Defining availability requirements for services is often complicated. A service may have multiple
functions and customers, each of whom may have different availability requirements for each
function.
Quite often for non-functional requirements, the line between underperformance (the service
being slow, unsecure, non-compliant, and so on) and unavailability is difficult to identify.

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When defining service availability, it is essential to consider the following:

● the criticality of business functions that are enabled by the service
● thresholds for various forms of underperformance and unavailability; for example, delays in
sending or receiving e-mail may be treated as service level degradation, not service
unavailability, until they reach the agreed threshold

● the number of users, business units, and/or sites that are impacted; for example, the service
may only be considered unavailable if more than a certain percentage of users are impacted

● whether certain vital users, business units, sites, and so on, are impacted; for example, for an
e-mail service, it may be that, if users who need to communicate directly with customers and
partners are able to use the service, the service is considered available

● the service delivery schedule and peak hours: a service that only has outages at night or on
weekends may not be considered unavailable.

These factors reflect how the service provider and customers define unavailability. It is good
practice to document the agreed availability criteria for the service in a service level agreement.

2.2.4 Availability metrics

Availability is one of the most essential indicators of service quality, so service providers must be
able to measure, assess, and report availability. Widely accepted practice is to report availability
as a percentage, which can be calculated using a simple formula:
Availability = (agreed service time - downtime ) / agreed service time
This formula can be useful, especially for resource provision services, but it does not reflect the
business impacts of complicated service disruption scenarios.
The ideal availability metric would measure financial losses due to service unavailability.
Unfortunately, it is often difficult or impossible to measure or estimate such a metric. Therefore,
the service provider and the customer should define a set of acceptable metrics that reflect how
the consumer loses money due to service outages, even if these metrics may be slightly
inaccurate.
The following factors should be considered:
● The longer the cumulative service downtime is, the higher the losses are.
● The longer a single service outage is, the higher the losses are. In most cases, financial losses
grow exponentially during an outage. The service provider may face fines, regulatory
judgments, diminished competitive advantage, reputational damage, and so on.

● The more frequent the outages are, the higher the losses are, because the expenses associated
with managing a loss event and restarting business operations are high.

Availability can be measured, assessed, and reported in various ways. These include, but are not
limited to, the following metrics:
● MTBF
● minimum time between failures

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● number of service disruptions
● total downtime over the period
● maximum single outage
● MTRS.
When defining metrics to measure availability, it is crucial to reflect the business impact of service
disruptions rather than the technical availability of service components.

2.2.5 Availability measurement

Availability measurements are based on accurately tracked periods of downtime. Therefore, one of
the most important objectives for the availability management practice is to design and manage
availability monitoring tools and translate the resulting data into meaningful service availability
information.
Incident management records are a source of service disruptions data. However, availability data
based on incident logs is often unreliable and difficult to align to the agreed service availability
metrics.
Infrastructure monitoring tools are common sources of availability data. However, although
information from these tools is useful when measuring the availability of resource provision
services, it is less useful when measuring the availability of services that enable business
operations. Tools such as real user monitoring and business transaction monitoring are more useful
for these services.
Table 2.1 outlines the availability measurement methods further.

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Table 2.1 Availability measurement methods

Availability Description
measurement method

Incident records Incident records usually include the timestamps when the incident was identified
and resolved so that the duration of outage can be calculated. However, this
method has limitations, including:

● The incident may not be identified and recorded at the same time as the service
becoming unavailable.

● The incident may not be resolved, and its resolution may not be recorded, at the
same time as service availability is restored.

● Not all incidents are availability incidents (see section 2.2.3 for details about
availability criteria).

● Related incident records should be linked and the possible overlap of incidents
over time should be considered in order to accurately estimate the period of
downtime.

In small-scale service providers, this method of measuring availability may work

well, but it is less useful in large-scale organizations due to the larger number of
services and incidents.
IT infrastructure Infrastructure monitoring tools are also sources of availability data. However, such
monitoring tools measure CI availability, not service availability. Service and configuration
models might be used to understand service availability based on components’
availability data.
However, this method’s limitations should be considered:

● The service component outage may not cause a service outage.

● Service unavailability may be caused by underperformance, as well as the
outage, of components.

These issues might be overcome by developing a service health model; a model that
determines how the underperformance or outage of a component impacts other
components in the service model.
Developing a service health model is a time-consuming exercise that, in many
cases, is not the best use of time because the IT infrastructure changes rapidly.
Business transaction
Business transaction monitoring is a way of measuring the availability and
monitoring/real user
performance of IT services from a business operations/transactions perspective. A
monitoring
variety of data collection methods might be used for the purpose, including
network packet sniffing, log parsing, agent-based middleware protocol sniffing,
reading database records, and others.

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Two particular methods of business transaction monitoring are:

● Synthetic monitoring A method for monitoring applications by simulating users’

activity. Synthetic monitoring uses simulated transactions from a robot client
that mimic typical user actions.

● Real user monitoring (RUM) RUM may capture server-side data in order to
reconstruct end-user experience or directly monitor user interactions with the
application and what users experience at the point of service consumption.

2.3 SCOPE

The availability management practice ensures that services deliver agreed levels of availability to
meet the needs of customers and users cost-effectively. To achieve this, the practice includes the
definition, measurement, analysis, and improvement of availability and provides a centre of
expertise for availability matters to support other service management practices.
The scope of the availability management practice is very broad. Almost every ITIL practice
contributes to service availability, directly or indirectly. Activities of other practices that are
closely related to the availability management practice are listed in Table 2.2. It is important to
remember that ITIL practices are merely collections of tools to use in the context of value
streams; they should be combined as necessary, depending on the situation.
Table 2.2 Activities related to the availability management practice described in other practice
guides

Activity Practice guide

Negotiating and agreeing customer requirements SLM
for availability
Designing availability controls as a part of the Service design
service model
Aligning availability controls with business Architecture management
architecture
Identifying risks associated with availability Risk management
Analysing the impacts of changes on availability Change enablement
targets
Monitoring the availability of services Monitoring and event management
Justifying new availability controls Portfolio management
Implementing risk mitigation measures Project management, change enablement
Changing the IT infrastructure to improve availability
Testing availability controls during the service Service validation and testing
transition
Reacting to events which might affect the Incident management, monitoring and event
organization’s ability to meet availability targets management
Managing availability incidents
Managing and implementing improvements on an Continual improvement
ongoing basis

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2.3.1 The line between availability and continuity

The line between service continuity and availability management is subtle. Both of these practices
involve the concept of risk and identifying and preparing for events that threaten to disable
services. In both cases, an understanding of VBFs, risk assessment, and business impact analysis
(BIA) of service failures is required. Ultimately, both practices ensure the organization's resistance
to failures.
Some organizations prefer not to separate availability and continuity management. However, there
are some differences, as is outlined in Table 2.3.
Table 2.3 The distinction between the availability management and service continuity
management practices

Availability management Service continuity management

Focuses on high-probability risks Focuses on high-impact risks (emergencies,
disasters)
More proactive More reactive
Reduces the likelihood of unwanted events Reduces the impacts of unwanted events
Focuses on technical solutions Focuses on organizational measures
Focuses on optimization Focuses on creating redundancy
Is not a part of the corporate function Often is part of the corporate function
Business-as-usual Force-majeure
MTRS, MTBF, mean time between Recovery time objective, recovery point objective
service incidents
The service continuity management practice is not interested in minor or short-term failures that
do not have serious impacts on the organization. It focuses on risks associated with significant
damage, regardless of the likelihood of their occurrence. Often these are emergency situations;
disasters such as fires, flooding, power outages, data centre or site failures, and so on. Although
the availability management practice does not ignore the negative impacts of failures on the
service provider and the consumer, minor interruptions of individual components are also
considered in the process.
Availability planning focuses on fulfilling current and future agreed customer requirements and
avoiding deviations. The availability management practice finds and eliminates single points of
failure by implementing countermeasures that are generally proactive and reduce the likelihood of
unwanted events. The service continuity management practice focuses on planning to manage the
serious consequences of disruptive events. Service continuity management activities generally do
not impact the probability of an incident occurring.
The purpose of the availability management practice is to ensure that the availability of the
services provided meets the current and future agreed requirements of customers at a reasonable
cost. Through optimization, practitioners try to achieve the maximum level of availability with the
available resources. Continuity management activities almost always create redundancies (such as
backup sites, a replacement equipment fund, external agreements, and so on) in case of an
emergency. There is a tension between the objectives of the two practices.
Lastly, the availability management practice works with statistics and analyses trends, whereas
the continuity management practice is concerned with how to respond to disruptive events.

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2.3.2 Availability management’s role in managing service risks
The concept of risk is central to the availability management practice. In order to meet service
availability targets, the practice needs information about risks, which can be provided by the risk
management practice.
An effective availability management practice can therefore contribute significantly to risk
management. A large proportion of risk mitigation measures are related in some way to availability
controls.
Availability management generally focuses on identifying and eliminating single points of failure or
unreliable or weak components, when it is cost-justifiable (see 2.4.3 for details).

2.4 PRACTICE SUCCESS FACTORS

Definition: Practice success factor
A complex functional component of a practice that is required for the practice to fulfil its
purpose.

A practice success factor (PSF) is more than a task or activity, as it includes components of all four
dimensions of service management. The nature of the activities and resources of PSFs within a
practice may differ, but together they ensure that the practice is effective.
The availability management practice includes the following PSFs:

● identifying service availability requirements

● measuring, assessing, and reporting service availability
● treating service availability risks.

2.4.1 Identifying service availability requirements

To effectively manage availability, the service provider should identify the service availability
requirements. These requirements should reflect how service customers may be impacted by
service outages.
Identifying a service’s availability requirements may be a separate activity, but it is more
commonly a part of service level negotiation within the SLM practice, or a broader BIA performed
jointly with the service continuity management practice.
Identifying service availability requirements includes:
● understanding customer requirements for service availability
● determining availability criteria
● determining availability metrics and setting targets.

2.4.1.1 Understanding customer requirements for service availability

The business analysis and SLM practices normally involve communicating with customers to
understand their availability requirements for IT services and negotiate service level requirements.
The availability management practice provides important support and input to the SLM, business
analysis, and service design practices. Availability requirements always balance cost and quality;
the availability management practice can play a key role in optimizing the availability of a service
to meet increasing availability demands while deferring an increase in costs.

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2.4.1.2 Determining availability criteria

The line between availability and unavailability should be clearly defined. The following factors
should be considered when determining service availability criteria:
● the criticality of business functions that are enabled by a service
● thresholds for underperformance and complete unavailability (there may be acceptable delays
that should not be considered service unavailability)

● scale factor (number of users, business units, sites impacted)

● certain users, business units, sites, and so on that are impacted
● the service delivery schedule and peak hours.
See section 2.2.3 for more details.

2.4.1.3 Determining availability metrics and setting targets

Availability is the most crucial service quality indicator because service customers typically lose
money because of service outages. Availability metrics and targets should accurately reflect how
consumers are impacted by service unavailability (see section 2.2.4 for details).

2.4.2 Measuring, assessing, and reporting service availability

Service providers must be able to measure, assess, and report availability correctly. It is a widely
accepted practice to report availability as a percentage, which can be calculated using a simple
formula based on uptime and downtime. Although it can be suitable in many cases (especially for
resource provision services), this method lacks visibility of the business impacts of complicated
service disruption scenarios.
It is important to consider various ways of measuring, assessing, and reporting availability,
including, but not limited to, the following metrics (see 2.2.4 for details):
● MTBF
● minimum time between failures
● number of service disruptions
● total downtime over the period
● maximum single outage
● MTRS.
Whichever set of metrics is suitable for a service, it is important to reflect the business impact of
service disruptions, rather than the technical availability of service components.
One of the most important objectives for the availability management practice is to design and
ensure sufficient availability monitoring. Then, to translate the monitoring data into meaningful
service availability information.

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Incident records are one obvious source of service disruptions data. However, it is often difficult to
obtain reliable availability data based on incident records, especially for user--reported incidents.
It is also difficult to align the data with agreed service availability metrics.
Infrastructure monitoring tools are more reliable sources of availability data. However, although
they work well for measuring resource provision services, it is very difficult to measure the
availability of services that enable business operations correctly based on infrastructure
monitoring data. Tools such as real user monitoring, business transaction monitoring, and so on can
help with this (see section 2.2.5).

2.4.3 Treating service availability risks

The availability management practice is not only about planning and monitoring availability. This
practice includes the definition and management of controls to manage a range of risks that might
impact service availability. For this, it is used in conjunction with the risk management practice
and other risk-focused practices (including the service continuity management, capacity and
performance management, and information security management practice). An effective
availability management practice can make a significant contribution to risk management 1.
The measures outlined in Table 2.4 may be designed and implemented as a part of an overall risk
mitigation plan.

Table 2.4 The four dimensions of availability management

Service management dimension Countermeasures to availability risks

Organizations and people Developing the people’s capabilities with training

Information and technology The exploitation of fault-tolerant technology to mask the

impacts of planned or unplanned component downtime

Duplexing, or the provision of alternative IT infrastructure

components, to allow one component to take over the work of
another component

Improving component reliability by enhancing testing regimes

Improving software design and development

Introducing a resilient telecommunication network

Data protection in operation: RAID arrays and disk mirroring for

LAN servers to prevent data loss and ensure the continued
availability of data

Monitoring (to provide prompt alerts)

Partners and suppliers Improved externally supplied services, contracts, or
agreements
Value streams and processes Improved incident management

Improved testing

1
Risk management: ITIL® Practice Guide.

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Continuous integration/continuous delivery

When choosing an availability control, the effectiveness and efficiency of each option should be
assessed 2. It is also important to continually control and validate the effectiveness and efficiency
of availability arrangements.

● Effectiveness According to risk management principles, the effects of availability controls

should be assessed and compared to the expected losses due to incidents.

● Efficiency The costs of an availability control should also be assessed and compared to its
benefits. Benefits are calculated by estimating the reduction in the likelihood of incidents after
the control is implemented, then multiplying it by the severity of the impact the incidents
would have if they occurred. This value should be compared in terms of cost to the cost of
implementing the measure (cost benefit analysis can be used here).

It is usually cheaper to design the right level of service availability into a service from the start,
rather than try and add it subsequently. Also, once a service gets a reputation for unreliability, it
becomes very difficult to repair.

The following forms of loss, proposed by FAIR 3, might be useful when assessing service availability
risks:
● productivity the reduction in a service provider’s ability to deliver services
● response expenses associated with managing a loss event
● replacement the intrinsic value of an asset, or the expense associated with replacing lost or
damaged assets (e.g. purchasing a replacement server)

● SLA fines and regulatory judgments legal or regulatory actions levied against the service
provider

● competitive advantage losses associated with diminished competitive advantage

● reputation losses associated with an external perception of the service provider.
It is also important to understand how impacts may change over time. Losses due to service
outages often grow exponentially over time. Along with losses related to the reduction in an
organization’s ability to generate its primary value proposition, reputational risks and the threat of
financial sanctions arise.
Agreed availability controls are implemented through service design, software development and
management, and infrastructure and platform management practices.

2.5 KEY METRICS

The effectiveness and performance of ITIL practices should be assessed within the context of the
value streams to which each practice contributes. As with the performance of any tool, the

2
For details see Risk management: ITIL® Practice Guide.
3
An Introduction to Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR)
ftp://mail.im.tku.edu.tw/Prof_Liang/IRM/10%20An%20Introduction%20to%20Factor%20Analysis%20
of%20Information%20Risk.pdf [Accessed 24th February 2020]
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practice’s performance can only be assessed within the context of its application. However, tools
can differ greatly in design and quality, and these differences define a tool’s potential or
capability to be effective when used according to their purpose. Further guidance on metrics, key
performance indicators (KPIs), and other tools that can help with this can be found in the
measurement and reporting practice guide.
Key metrics for the availability management practice are mapped to its PSFs. They can be used as
KPIs in the context of value streams to assess the contribution of the practice to the effectiveness
and efficiency of those value streams. Some examples of key metrics are given in Table 2.5.
Table 2.5 Example metrics for the practice success factors

Practice success factors Key metrics

Identifying service availability Percentage of products and services with clearly documented
requirements
availability criteria

Percentage of (critical) products and services with availability

requirements documented in an SLA

Timely updating of service availability requirements in case of

service changes

Measuring, assessing, and Percentage of products and services with determined

reporting service availability
availability metrics

Percentage of products and services covered by availability

and performance monitoring

Percentage of products and services included in service

availability reports

Treating service availability MTBF achievement

risks
Minimum time between failures achievement

Number of service disruptions achievement

Total downtime over the period achievement

Maximum service outage achievement

MTRS achievement

Percentage of effective availability controls

Ratio between actual losses and expected losses

The correct aggregation of metrics into complex indicators will make it easier to use the data for
the ongoing management of value streams, and for the periodic assessment and continual
improvement of the availability management practice. There is no single best solution. Metrics will
be based on the overall service strategy and priorities of an organization, as well as the goals of
the value streams to which the practice contributes.

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3 Value streams and processes

3.1 VALUE STREAMS CONTRIBUTION

Like any other ITIL management practice, the availability management practice contributes to
multiple value streams. It is important to remember that a value stream is never formed from a
single practice. The availability management practice combines with other practices to provide
high-quality services to consumers. The main value chain activities to which availability
management contributes are:
● plan
● deliver and support
● design and transition
● obtain/build
● improve

The contribution of the availability management practice to the service value chain is shown in
Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1 Heat map of the contribution of the availability management practice to value chain
activities

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3.2 PROCESSES

Each practice may include one or more processes and activities that may be necessary to fulfil the
purpose of that practice.
Definition: Process

A set of interrelated or interacting activities that transform inputs into outputs. A process
takes one or more defined inputs and turns them into defined outputs. Processes define
the sequence of actions and their dependencies.

Availability management activities form two processes:

● establishing service availability control
● analysing and improving service availability.

3.2.1 Establishing service availability control

This process includes the activities listed in Table 3.1 and transforms the inputs into outputs.
Table 3.1 Inputs, activities, and outputs of the establishing service availability control process

Key inputs Activities Key outputs

Customer requirements Identifying service availability Agreed service availability

requirements requirements
SLR drafts
Agreeing service availability Availability measurement
Information about available
requirements requirements
resources
Determining availability Availability report template(s)
measurement requirements

Designing availability metrics

and reports

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Figure 3.1 shows a workflow diagram of the process.

Figure 3.2 Workflow for the establishing service availability control process

These activities may be performed with varying levels of formality by many people in the
organization. Table 3.2 describes these activities further.
Table 3.2 Activities of the establishing service availability control process

Activity Description
Identifying service The organization may have draft SLRs and service availability requirements,
availability but they are rarely defined in a measurable and manageable way. Customers
requirements communicate their requirements for service availability based on their
business needs.

The availability management practice should work with the SLM practice to
clarify service availability criteria and availability indicators, which should
accurately reflect the impacts of service outages on the customer (see
sections 2.2.3 and 2.4.1 for details).

Service provider representatives from a customer-facing team or business-

analysis team, or product and service owners, are usually involved in
documenting service availability requirements.
Agreeing service Analysis of resource requirements may be needed to define whether
availability fulfilling availability requirements is possible and affordable. The main
requirements output is a quote with estimated costs and a timeline for fulfilment.
This analysis should include agreements with the service provider’s suppliers
and partners to ensure that they will support the required service level.
Determining In order to analyse, report, and improve service availability, the service
availability provider must measure it. The availability monitoring approach should be
defined based on the service availability requirements, reporting policy,

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measurement customer reporting requirements, type of the service, and available
requirements monitoring tools.

The main task is to define how service outages will be tracked.

Designing availability Metrics should be determined based on the service availability
metrics and reports requirements. The following availability metrics should be considered:

● availability percentage
● MTBF
● minimum time between failures
● number of service disruptions
● total downtime over the period
● maximum downtime
● MTRS.

Whatever set of metrics is suitable for the service, is important to reflect

the business impact of service disruptions, rather than the technical
availability of the service components (see 2.4.2 for details).

After metrics are chosen, a report or dashboard template should be

designed to display the results.

3.2.2 Analysing and improving service availability

This process includes the activities listed in Table 3.3 and transforms the inputs into
outputs.

Table 3.3 Inputs, activities, and outputs of the analysing and improving service availability process

Key inputs Activities Key outputs

Monitoring data Service availability analysis Service availability report(s)

Incident records Reporting service availability Problem records

Service models Planning and designing service Availability management plan(s)

availability
Availability report template(s) New and updated controls

Agreed service availability

requirements

Risk register(s)

Service specification(s)

These activities may be carried out with varying levels of formality by many people in the
organization.
Figure 3.2 shows a workflow diagram of the process.

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Figure 3.3 Workflow of the analysing and improving service availability process

Table 3.4 describes these activities further.

Table 3.4 Activities of the analysing and improving service availability process

Activity Description
Service availability The achievement of service availability requirements must be confirmed.
analysis All deviations from pre-defined levels must be subject to investigation, and
corrective action must be undertaken if a fault is found.

The availability management practice uses monitoring data, such as

incident records, as inputs for the review and analysis of service
availability. This analysis may be performed on different levels:

● service components/IT infrastructure level: performed by the availability

manager, system administrators, and engineers

● service level: performed by the availability manager, service owner, and

SLM manager.

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Trend analysis should be performed to detect flaws that have not yet
caused incidents. Problems or risks may be logged.

Because business needs and customer demand may change, the levels of
availability for a service may need to be revised. Such reviews should be
part of the SLM practice’s regular service reviews. Inputs from the service
continuity management practice, particularly from BIAs and risk assessment
exercises, should also be considered regularly.

Continually considering opportunities to optimize the availability of the IT

infrastructure and services is important. The benefits of this regular-review
approach are that, enhanced levels of availability, with much lower costs,
may be achievable.
Reporting service The service provider produces reports or dashboards demonstrating service
availability availability achievements. These are communicated by agreed-upon
channels.
Service availability reporting is usually a part of overall service quality
reporting through the SLM practice 4.
Planning and designing The service provider should determine an appropriate, cost-effective set of
service availability service continuity strategies. More preventive measures need to be
adopted for those processes and services that have earlier and higher
impacts. For services where the impacts are lower and take longer to
develop, greater emphasis should be placed on recovery measures (see
section 2.4.3 for details).

The availability management practice ensures that new or changed services

meet the customer’s availability requirements. The work involves
producing recommendations, plans, and documents on design guidelines for
new and changed services. In some cases, an availability plan may be
produced, which will include the following:

● current availability levels

● key service components
● anticipated customer requirement changes
● availability impacts of new requirements
● recommendations of availability controls.

4
See the Service level management: ITIL® 4 Practice Guide for details.

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4 Organizations and people

4.1 ROLES, COMPETENCIES, AND RESPONSIBILITIES

The ITIL practice guides do not describe the practice management roles, such as practice owner,
practice lead, or practice coach. They focus instead on the specialist roles that are specific to
each practice. The structure and naming of each role may differ from organization to organization,
so any roles defined in ITIL should not be treated as mandatory, or even recommended.
Remember, roles are not job titles. One person can take on multiple roles and one role can be
assigned to multiple people.
Roles are described in the context of processes and activities. Each role is characterized with a
competency profile based on the model shown in Table 4.1.
Table 4.1 Competency codes and profiles

Competency code Competency profile (activities and skills)

Leader Decision-making, delegating, overseeing other activities, providing
L
incentives and motivation, and evaluating outcomes
Administrator Assigning and prioritizing tasks, record-keeping, ongoing
A
reporting, and initiating basic improvements
Coordinator/communicator Coordinating multiple parties, maintaining
C
communication between stakeholders, and running awareness campaigns
Methods and techniques expert Designing and implementing work
M
techniques, documenting procedures, consulting on processes, work analysis,
and continual improvement
Technical expert Providing technical (IT) expertise and conducting
T
expertise-based assignments

Examples of roles that are involved in availability management activities are listed in Table 4.2,
together with the associated competency profiles and specific skills.

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Table 4.2 Examples of roles with responsibility for availability management activities

Activity Responsible roles Competency Specific skills

profile
Establishing service availability control
Identifying service Service/product CTA Business analysis
availability requirements owner
Good knowledge of the service
Relationship manager
consumer’s business
Service designer
Customer Good knowledge of the products,
including their architecture and
configuration

Communication and coordination

Agreeing service Service owner CA Communication and negotiation

availability requirements Relationship manager Good knowledge of the product,
Customer including its architecture and
configuration
Determining availability Availability manager TM Good understanding of
measurement Monitoring tool monitoring tools and techniques
requirements administrator
Awareness of technology
Monitoring and event
available on the market for
manager Service
monitoring and event
designer
management
Technical expert
Designing availability Availability manager CM Communication and negotiation
metrics and reports Service owner Report and dashboard design
Relationship manager skills
IT quality manager
Service availability analysis and improvement
Service availability Availability manager MT Excellent analytical skills
analysis Service owner
Knowledge of methods and
Technical expert
techniques, such as fault-tree
IT quality manager
analysis, component failure
impact analysis, and so on

Familiarity with analytical tools

Good understanding of possible

business impacts due to service
outages

Reporting service Service owner CA Knowledge of agreements and

availability Relationship manager expectations
Customer
Understanding the consumer
context

Communication and negotiation

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Planning and designing Availability manager TM Good understanding of resilience

service availability Service designer options
Technical expert
Awareness of existing controls
Architecture manager
Awareness of the technology
available on the market

Good understanding of possible

business impacts due to service
outages

4.2 ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES AND TEAMS

Although the role of availability manager may be supported with formal positions and job
descriptions, it is unusual to see a dedicated organizational structure for the availability
management practice. Service availability is managed by other practices and organizational
functions. These functions are outlined in Table 4.3.
Table 4.3 Examples of availability management activities connected with other practices and
organizational functions

Process Activity Common execution scenario

Establishing service
Identifying service availability Service/product owner
availability control
requirements
May be performed as a part of the SLM
Agreeing service availability practice
requirements
Determining availability
Monitoring tools administrator
measurement requirements
May be performed as a part of monitoring
and event management practice

Designing availability metrics

Service/product owner
and reports
May be performed as a part of the SLM or
measurement and reporting practices

Service availability Service availability analysis

For service components/IT infrastructure:
analysis and
system and infrastructure administrators
improvement
For the service level: service/product
owner

Reporting service availability

Service/product owner

May be performed as a part of overall

service level reporting within SLM practice

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Planning and designing service
Performed in conjunction with the risk
availability
manager and business continuity
administrator. Depending on the service
lifecycle stage and organizational context,
a business analyst, architecture manager,
information security manager, and/or
system administrator may be involved

Because availability is impacted by almost every ITIL practice, it is a good idea to appoint an
availability manager who is accountable for ensuring cost-efficient availability management. This
role may be combined with the roles of service continuity administrator or IT risk manager.

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5 Information and technology

5.1 INFORMATION EXCHANGE, INPUTS/OUTPUTS

The effectiveness of the availability management practice is based on the quality of the
information used. This information includes, but is not limited to, information about:
● consumer’s business processes
● services and their architecture and design
● partners and suppliers and information on the services they provide
● regulatory requirements regarding service availability
● technology and services available on the market that may be relevant for service availability
arrangements
● information about monitoring tools and techniques.

This information may take various forms. The key inputs and outputs of the practice are listed in
section 3.

5.2 AUTOMATION AND TOOLING

In some cases, the availability management practice can significantly benefit from automation (see
section 3 for details). Where this is possible and effective, it may involve the solutions outlined in
Table 5.1.
Table 5.1 Automation solutions for availability management activities

Process activity Means of automation Key functionality Impact on the

effectiveness of the
practice

Establishing service availability control

Identifying service Service catalogue, In order to identify Very high

availability CMDB, BPM tools, VBFs of the service
requirements CMDB, service and availability
models, availability requirements analyst
and capacity should have access to
monitoring and information about
management tools, service components
and asset and service actions.
management tools BPM tools may
provide information
about consumer’s
processes and
operations supported
by the service

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Process activity Means of automation Key functionality Impact on the
effectiveness of the
practice

Agreeing service Contracting tools, Selection of Low

availability service portals alternative options
requirements Communication with
the service customer

Determining Reporting and Report and dashboard Low to high, depending

availability dashboarding tools, template design on the volume of
measurement service portals, and services and
requirements apps stakeholders who must
receive reports
Designing availability
metrics and reports

Service availability analysis and improvement

Service availability Infrastructure and Collection of system High

analysis application and service health
monitoring and data, processing and
reporting tools, built- analysis, dashboard
in user behaviour and report design and
monitoring tools, presentation
dashboarding and
reporting tools,
advanced analytics
tools

Reporting service Reporting and Report presentation Low to high, depending

availability dashboarding tools, on the volume of
service portals and services and
apps, email, other stakeholders who must
communication tools, receive reports
and social media

Planning and Architecture Determining existing Medium

designing service management tools, controls and
availability CMDB, change resilience measures.
initiation and control Initiation changes
tools which should be
implemented as a
part of availability
management plan
realization.

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6 Partners and suppliers

Very few services are delivered using only an organization’s own resources. Most, if not all, depend
on other services, often provided by third parties outside the organization (see section 2.4 of ITIL
Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition for a model of a service relationship). Relationships and dependencies
introduced by supporting services are described in the practice guides for service design,
architecture management, and supplier management.
Partners and suppliers may provide critical products and service components. The service provider
needs to negotiate and agree availability requirements with partners and suppliers in order to
meet service availability requirements.
Partners and suppliers may also provide services and solutions for ensuring resilience, such as
fault-tolerant and clustering technologies, load balancing, multi-level backup systems, monitoring
tools, and so on. In these cases, they should consider service availability when designing and
planning service provision.

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7 Important reminder
Most of the content of the practice guides should be taken as a suggestion of areas that an
organization might consider when establishing and nurturing their own practices. The practice
guides are catalogues of topics that organizations might think about not a list of answers. When
using the content of the practice guides, organizations should always follow the ITIL guiding
principles:
● focus on value
● start where you are
● progress iteratively with feedback
● collaborate and promote visibility
● think and work holistically
● keep it simple and practical
● optimize and automate.
More information on the guiding principles and their application can be found in section 4.3 of
ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition.

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8 Acknowledgments
AXELOS Ltd is grateful to everyone who has contributed to the development of this guidance.
These practice guides incorporate an unprecedented level of enthusiasm and feedback from across
the ITIL community. In particular, AXELOS would like to thank the following people.

8.1 AUTHORS

Pavel Demin

8.2 REVIEWERS

Roman Jouravlev

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