Availability Management

There is no single prebuilt process provided with Service Desk that directly delivers Availability Management. However, Service Desk does support you in performing the various Availability Management activities driven through your ITSM processes.

For example, a key concept in Availability Management is the setting of target availability levels for IT Services, and the on-going review of the actual availability of live services against those targets. Using the Service Portfolio process (see Service Portfolio Management), you are guided to identify the availability levels required for each Service during the Design stages. These are recorded on the Service CI or in individual Service Level agreements. Then, using Service Desk's ability to connect to external sources, you can view or import actual measured availability statistics for CIs or Services from external availability monitoring tools into the latest-value attributes on the Service CI.

Cost fields

The definition of a Service-CI includes a Cost field, presented to the end-user to indicate the departmental charge for receiving that Service, and also an asset cost / purchase cost. Using Object Designer, you can add a further Cost field to describe the cost to the business of any downtime. You can calculate this value yourself based on the nature of the service, its usage and its purpose in your business. Also relevant to Financial Management, these definitions in Service Portfolio and Configuration Management are direct feeds into the calculation of Service Unavailability as seen on your Service Availability reports.

Another process that impacts the monitoring of Service Availability in Service Desk is Event Management. Critical Events are automatically created and resolved as devices delivering services become available and unavailable. This provides easy tracking of uptime, downtime, mean time between failure, mean time to repair and so on. Use the provided Crystal Reports to see these results.

For more information about Event Management, see Ivanti Event Manager and Event Management.

Reporting on Availability

All data imported into Ivanti Service Desk can be reported on for use by all the other processes followed in the tool.

To get an overview of availability by CI Type, create a query over all CIs and group this by type. Their availability data can be used as columns on the results set – such as the Outage type, the device down time and device up time.
To understand the impact of failures to Vital Business Functions (VBFs), write a query over all CIs and filter this by those that are marked as a VBF. Opening these records enables you to access the impact diagrams associated with these services.
To report on the Serviceability of suppliers, use the ServiceCapacityPerformance.rpt Crystal Report.
A single point of failure (SPOF) report is included out of the box for identifying items in the CMDB that may need attention.
To conduct a component failure impact analysis (CFIA), use the impact analysis feature in Configuration Management.