ITIL Availability Management Process: Three Key Aspects You Must Know

The ITIL training framework defines availability as three key elements: Reliability (maintenability), and Serviceability. Reliability measures how long a service can run without interruption. Maintainability measures how quickly a service can be restored after it has failed. Serviceability measures how efficient third-party suppliers deliver their services. These aspects of availability management are covered in most ITIL trainings online and may be familiar to IT service owners. There are many details that must be considered when integrating these factors into the ITIL availability management process. These are the important aspects and activities that make up the ITIL availability management process.

Reliability
ITIL availability management is all about reliability. It refers to how long a component, service, or configuration item can continue to perform its agreed function without interruption. This is an important aspect of service delivery as it is what is expected from a service to function without interruption or outage. This is a sign of reliability. For example, if a service performs above the agreed service levels for more than 1000 minutes, it is considered reliable. As you can see, the more reliable a service is, the higher quality of the service will be delivered to the customers.

Maintainability
Maintainability, in the ITIL availability management framework is the measure of how quickly and effectively a service, component, or configuration item can be returned to normal working order after a failure.
Let’s say that a search engine stopped working properly. It takes five minutes to bring the server back to normal operation. This is an indicator of the service’s maintainability that should be managed with ITIL availability management. Failure in the service does not necessarily mean that the service is down.
If the ITIL service level for the search engine is to return results within 100 milliseconds and the search engine starts returning results in over one hundred milliseconds then this is considered a failure. However, it is not an outage. This should also be fixed, as it does not meet the service levels.

ITIL Availability Management Serviceability
The last aspect that is important is Serviceability. Serviceability refers to the ability of a third-party supplier to fulfill their contract terms. This includes availability, reliability, and/or maintainability. IT Service providers who are receiving external services from suppliers or partners must ensure that the supplier meets the service standards. This is done in an underpinning contract signed by the IT Service provider with the business.
If the IT Service provider needs 98% availability during the hours of operation, at least 1000 hours of work without interruption or outage, and if the IT Service Provider expects the supplier fix a problem with a service in less that five minutes, these are examples of Serviceability. This is an important aspect and should be discussed between the supplier and IT service provider before signing the underpinning agreement.
ITIL Availability Management: Process Activities
This figure shows the process activities. The figure shows that there are two types fundamentally of activities: proactive and reactive. Reactive activities include monitoring and analyzing, reporting and reviewing service availability and component availability. They also include investigation of any service or component unavailability, and the investigation of possible remedial actions. Reactive actions are taken in order to monitor whether agreed availability levels have been met. If there are unavailability points or service and component unavailability, the root causes are investigated and corrective actions taken.