Service Manager

Working with Service Availability Management

•About Service Availability Management

•Service Availability Metrics

•Customizing Availability Management

About Service Availability Management

Service availability management offers the ability for an organization to look at and analyze events that happen over a period of time. You can calculate reliability (mean time between failures), and repairability (mean time between repairs), and how it affects both hardware and services. This helps IT organizations make decisions about when to replace hardware, install backup machines, or redesign services that do not meet uptime goals.

For information about how to configure event management, add tabs, and availability logs, see Configuring Event Management. For information about analytic metrics and on how to configure the Analytic Metrics workspace and dashboard, see About Analytic Metrics and About Analytic Metrics Dashboards and Charts.

Service availability metrics can be viewed from the Analytic Metrics workspace. Select Availability from the List icon on the right of the workspace toolbar. You can create and configure your own metrics or modify existing metrics. See Creating a Metric and the Service Availability section under Adding or Editing a Data Source for more information. The following metrics are available:

•Service Availability

•Service Availability, Reliability and Maintainability

•Service Availability and SLA compliance

•Service Availability and Service Satisfaction Rating

Outage reporting is usually calculated in minutes.

Metrics are calculated as follows:

•Availability (%) is calculated by comparing agreed service downtime to the agreed service uptime.

•Reliability or the average time the device or service is operational. Calculated by:
amount of time the item was available - total down time ÷ number of breaks in service.

•Maintainability is calculated by: total down time ÷ number of breaks in service.

Service Availability Metrics

•About Service Availability Metrics

•Service Availability Bar Chart

•Service Availability and Service Satisfaction Rating

•Service Availability and Service Level Agreement Compliance

•Service Availability, Reliability, and Maintainability

•CI Availability Log

About Service Availability Metrics

A number of preconfigured analytic metrics for service availability are available and can be viewed through the Analytic Metrics workspace dashboard. You can create new metrics and add them to the dashboard, or edit the existing metrics. The following is a list of the available metrics, and information about the display.

Service Availability Bar Chart

Displays the target availability (goal) and the actual availability for all services as a percentage. If the availability falls below the goal, the bar displays in red.

Service Availability and Service Satisfaction Rating

Displays the satisfaction rating for the service. Satisfaction information is collected by the survey module in comparison to the service availability. Higher availability equals higher satisfaction.

Service Availability and Service Level Agreement Compliance

Displays the availability of the service as it correlates to the service level agreement. The higher the availability the higher the compliance.

Service Availability, Reliability, and Maintainability

Lists all services in a tabulated format and displays actual, target, and total percentages. The date range for the metrics is defined by the saved search that was selected for this metric configuration. For information about editing the saved search or the metric see About Analytic Metrics.

CI Availability Log

This metric does not appear in the Analytic Metrics dashboard. Instead, it creates the availability log for each configuration item and is viewable only from a configuration item record. To view the information, select the Availability Log tab from any configuration item record. All configuration items (regardless of type) are set as 24/7 for hours of operational uptime.

The log displays the actual availability (as a percentage), the reliability (in minutes), and maintainability (in minutes) for each configuration item. Each item in the list encompasses a period of one month. this range is set for the configuration item availability log through the Analytic Metric > Availability tab > Settings >Availability > CI Availability > Data Source. For information about the options on this tab see Service Availability Metrics: Data Source Tab . The Analytic Metric > Availability tab > Settings >Availability > CI Availability > Object Mapping tab lists information that is exported and the list of the fields in the business object to which the information can be mapped.

Customizing Availability Management

You can edit business objects to create a new field to track the availability of any vital business function (such as email or database servers) and add the field to a specific service. Link the field to a configuration item map to assess and calculate the upstream and downstream impacts of any associated failures. See Working with the CI Map for more information.

Using the Service Manager API you can also integrate Service Manager data with third party software (such as financial systems). This enables receiving unavailability data and allows you to calculate the cost of the service downtime to the organization when monitoring devices and other assets (configuration items).