ITIL4 Practices: Availability Management

Introduction

• Focus on ITIL4 practices.
• Aim: Understand key points for ITIL4 and provide real-world experiences.
• Coverage: Availability Management from Service Management Practice.

Availability Management

• Part of 17 service management practices.
• Defined as ensuring agreed levels of availability to meet customer needs.
• Look at availability end-to-end, not just individual components.

Key Concepts

• End-to-End Availability:

  • Look through the lens of ITIL guiding principles.
  • Consider all components (application, database, network).
  • Availability isn’t just uptime; it’s also about performance.

• Terminology:

  • Uptime: Service level agreements (SLAs) often use uptime metrics.
  • Five Nines: 99.999% often referred to in cloud services.

• Architecture:

  • Critical for designing services to meet availability needs.
  • Involves continual improvement even after production.

ITIL4 Definitions

• Defined as the ability of IT service or configuration item to perform as agreed.
• Key metrics include:
  • Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF): Duration without failure.
  • Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR): Time from failure to resolution.

Availability Management Activities

• Negotiation: Agree on achievable targets internally or with external teams.
• Design: Infrastructure and applications designed for required availability.
• Data Collection: Ability to gather and measure availability data.
• Monitoring & Reporting: Use of tooling for automated reporting.
• Proactive Improvements: Plan for improvements, not just reactive responses.

Metrics and Considerations

• Operational Hours: Define what constitutes operational hours clearly.
• Maintenance Windows: Factor in maintenance periods in reporting.
• End-to-End Service Reporting: Consider holistic availability, including performance issues.

ITIL4 Service Value Chain

• Availability management touches all service value chain activities.
• Emphasis on planning, continuous improvement, and proactive activities.

Best Practices

• Architecture: Focus on resilience, scaling, and design for availability.
• End-to-End Thinking: Consider all aspects from application to network.
• Automated Recovery: Use of automated procedures for quicker recovery.
• Practice Recovery: Regular DR exercises, resilience testing.

Summary

• Cloud service providers like AWS integrate reliability as a core principle.
• It's essential to adopt a holistic approach to availability within ITIL4.
• Action Points: Ensure architecture and holistic approaches are core to availability management practices.

Conclusion

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