MOF Service

Management Function
Availability Management

Release
Approved
Review

Release
SLA
Review MOF Readiness
Review

Operations
Review

Microsoft ®
Solutions for Management
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Contents
Document Purpose.................................................................................................. 1
Executive Summary ................................................................................................ 2
Process and Activities ............................................................................................. 3
Overview .............................................................................................................. 3
New IT Services ............................................................................................... 3
Existing IT Services ......................................................................................... 4
Goals and Objectives....................................................................................... 4
Scope ................................................................................................................. 5
Key Definitions ................................................................................................ 6
Major Processes ............................................................................................... 7
Define Service Level Requirements .................................................................. 8
Define Critical Customer Functions ............................................................. 8
Define Availability Requirements................................................................. 9
Propose Availability Solution.......................................................................... 10
Identify Major Information Technology Service Components ............... 11
Design for Availability ................................................................................. 11
Availability Risks and Countermeasures................................................... 12
Life Cycle Management Needs.................................................................... 16
Design for Recovery...................................................................................... 18
Incident Life Cycle ........................................................................................ 19
Designing for Customer Satisfaction During Outages............................. 22
Management Processes................................................................................. 22
Formalize Operating Level Agreements ........................................................ 23
Roles and Responsibilities.................................................................................... 25
Availability Manager ........................................................................................ 25
Relationship to Other Processes .......................................................................... 27
Service Level Management .............................................................................. 27
Financial Management ..................................................................................... 28
Workforce Management................................................................................... 28
Service Continuity Management..................................................................... 28
Capacity Management...................................................................................... 28
Change Management........................................................................................ 28
Contributors........................................................................................................... 30
Document Purpose
This guide provides detailed information about the availability
management service management function (SMF) for
organizations that have deployed, or are considering deploying,
Microsoft technologies in a data center or other type of enterprise
computing environment. This is one of the more than 20 SMFs
defined and described in Microsoft® Operations Framework
(MOF). The guide assumes that the reader is familiar with the
intent, background, and fundamental concepts of MOF as well as
the Microsoft technologies discussed.
An overview of MOF and its companion, Microsoft Solutions
Framework (MSF), is available in the Introduction to Service
Management Functions guide. This overview guide also provides
abstracts of each of the service management functions defined
within MOF. Detailed information about the concepts and
principles of each of the frameworks is also available in technical
papers available at www.microsoft.com/solutions/msm.
2 Service Management Function Guide

Executive Summary
Availability has become one of the most important aspects of
service delivery in the highly visible e-business global economy.
Consequently, the demand for 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week
operation is greater than ever. Availability, or the lack of it, has a
dramatic influence on customer satisfaction and can very quickly
impact the overall reputation and success of the enterprise.
Availability management is responsible for ensuring that service-
affecting incidents do not occur, or that timely and effective
action is taken when they do.
Risks to availability may be caused by technology, processes and
procedures, and human error. Countermeasures, such as
carefully designed testing and release procedures and
appropriate staff training plans, can be employed to help
mitigate these risks. Risks to availability exist throughout the
whole IT infrastructure and within every management process.
Although not directly responsible for each of these processes,
availability management is responsible for making sure that all
areas of risk to availability are taken into account and that the
overall IT infrastructure and the maturity of management
processes supporting a given IT service are sufficient.
Availability management and service continuity management are
closely related in this respect as both processes strive to eliminate
risks to the availability of IT services. The prime focus of
availability management is handling the routine risks to
availability that can be reasonably expected to occur on a day-to-
day basis. Rare, expensive, or unanticipated risks are handled by
service continuity management.
 Availability Management 3

Process and Activities

Overview
The availability management process focuses on two distinct
areas, although many of the overall tasks are the same. The first
is a new IT service that clearly involves the fullest requirements
definitions and design phases. The second area is existing IT
services that may require significant short-term effort to improve
levels of availability.

New IT Services
New IT services provide the best opportunity for achieving
availability targets in a cost-effective manner because availability
considerations can be built in from the earliest stages. This allows
the most appropriate technologies to be selected and an IT
support infrastructure to be built that provides the required level
of operational maturity.
The customer and IT organization have the best opportunity in
this scenario to work closely together on the definition and level
of availability to be provided by the IT service and to agree upon
the level of investment required. This avoids inappropriate
expectations from emerging in the future and allows any
mismatches between the levels of availability and the investment
required to be resolved early.
The aim of new IT services is to achieve the desired availability
targets from day one and to successfully manage the levels of
availability throughout the life cycle of the solution. It is
particularly important to manage levels of availability during the
introduction of the functional and technological changes
demanded by today’s fast-moving business environments.
4 Service Management Function Guide

Existing IT Services
Existing IT services can have their availability levels significantly
improved or stabilized through the adoption of a formal
availability management process. They can then benefit from an
ongoing continuous improvement process and careful
management of future changes.
The challenge of improving availability levels in existing IT
services is they often come with a legacy of design constraints
and technology challenges that may not be cost-effective to
overcome. That is why building availability in from the very
beginning is so important.
The life cycle approach is very similar to new IT services and
begins with a definition of availability with the customer and
determination of an appropriate budget for improvements and
ongoing maintenance that can be justified by the cost of
downtime.
In some respects, existing IT services have an advantage over
new IT services in that they have a track record of service
delivery that can be examined in detail and any shortcomings
and areas of exposure addressed. The availability design process
includes an investigation of the history of service outage
experienced by the customer, as well as root cause analysis as
appropriate.
At any one time, the role of the availability manager invariably
includes both the improvement of existing IT services as well as
the introduction of new IT services. In addition, the introduction
of major change to an existing IT service, such as upgrading from
one technology platform to another, also involves mixing these
two scenarios. The basic process to be followed is the same in
either case.

Goals and Objectives

The objective of the availability management function is to
ensure that any given IT service consistently and cost-effectively
delivers the level of availability required by the customer.
 Availability Management 5

Scope
Availability management is concerned with the design,
implementation, measurement, and management of IT
infrastructure availability to ensure that stated business
requirements for availability are consistently met. In particular
● Availability management should be applied to all new IT
services and for established services where service level
requirements (SLRs) or service level agreements (SLAs) are
established.
● Availability management can be applied to IT services that
are defined as critical business functions, even when no
SLA exists.
● Availability management can be applied to the suppliers
(internal and external) that form the IT support
organization as a precursor to the creation of a formal SLA.
● Availability management considers all aspects of the IT
infrastructure and supporting organization that may
impact availability, including training, skills, policy,
process effectiveness, procedures, and tools.
● Availability management is not responsible for Business
Continuity Management and the resumption of business
processing after a major disaster. This is the responsibility
of the service continuity management SMF. However,
availability management is closely related and provides
key inputs to service continuity management.
6 Service Management Function Guide

Key Definitions
The following are key definitions within the availability
management processes:
Availability. Ability of a component or service to perform its
required function at a stated instant or over a stated period
of time.
Countermeasures. Actions taken to prevent or reduce the
effect of an identified risk.
Critical business functions. The critical elements of the
business process supported by an IT service.
Downtime. The unavailability of the IT Service during hours
that the business deems the systems to be available—as
advertised within SLAs.
End-to-end service. All components of the IT Infrastructure
required for delivering an IT service.
High availability. Minimizing or masking component
failures.
Incident life cycle. An availability technique which analyses
the broken down stages of an incident to allow for timing
and measurement of each stage.
Maintainability. The ability of an IT infrastructure
component to be retained in, or restored to, an operational
state.
Operating level agreement. An internal agreement covering
the delivery of services that support the IT service provider
in the delivery of services.
Risk Management. The identification, selection, and
implementation of countermeasures to the identified risks
to assets to reduce them to an acceptable level.
Reliability. The freedom from failure of services and
components over a given period of time.
Serviceability. The contractual arrangements made with
Third Party IT service providers to provided or maintain IT
Services or components.
Service level agreement. Written agreement between a service
provider and the customer(s) that documents agreed
service levels for a service.
Service outages. See downtime.
 Availability Management 7

Major Processes
Availability Management comprises of three main processes and
a number of subprocesses as follows:
● Define service level requirements
● Define critical customer functions
● Define availability objectives
● Propose availability solution
● Identify major Information Technology service components
● Design for availability
● Availability risks and countermeasures
● Life cycle management needs
● Design for recovery
● Incident life cycle
● Designing for customer satisfaction during outages
● Management processes
● Formalize operating level agreements

Start

Define Service
Level Objectives

Propose
Availability
Solution

Formalize
Operating Level
Agreements

End

Figure 1
Availability process flow diagram
8 Service Management Function Guide

Define Service Level Requirements

The terms availability and “high availability” can have very
different meanings depending on the context in which they are
used and the audience involved. They can be used to describe a
wide range of business goals and technical requirements, from
relatively easily achieved hardware-only availability targets, to
very demanding mission-critical targets applying to the
availability of the IT service as a whole.
As a result, it is relatively easy for inappropriate expectations to
be set concerning availability targets. It is also easy for the
customer community to demand higher levels of availability than
they are actually willing to pay for once the cost implications are
understood.
Availability management needs to start with carefully agreeing
to availability targets with the customer and determining the cost
of downtime or unavailability of the IT service in question so that
a realistic IT budget can be established.
This process involves an element of education and negotiation on
both sides as the customer needs to understand how to define
and articulate their availability requirements. The IT
organization needs to understand the different customer
functions that make up the overall IT service and which of these
are the most critical.
The overall task of negotiating service level objects is defined in
the service level management process. A brief overview of the
process is presented here to provide a background. For more
information, see the MOF service level management operations
guide.

Define Critical Customer Functions

Any given IT service often contains multiple customer functions
or transaction, and some of these will have varying availability
requirements and impacts on the business if they fail. Each of the
major business functions or transactions that make up the overall
IT service needs to be identified and ranked in order of
importance with the most critical elements being singled out for
particular attention.
Interdependencies between services and any reliance on less-
important services also need to be identified. For example, a new
critical call-handling system may rely heavily on file and print
services being provided from elsewhere within the IT
infrastructure, and this may require the criticality of the file and
print service to be upgraded accordingly.
 Availability Management 9

Define Availability Requirements

The availability of an IT service is a complex issue that spans
many disciplines. There are many different IT approaches that
can be taken to deliver the required levels of availability, each
with their own cost implications.
In complete contrast to this, however, availability requirements
can often be expressed in relatively simplistic terms by the
customer and without a full understanding of the implications.
This can lead to misunderstandings between the customer and
the IT organization, inappropriate levels of investment, and
ultimately to customer dissatisfaction through inappropriate
expectations being set.
One expressed requirement for 99.5 percent availability can be
completely different to another requirement for 99.5 percent. One
requirement may discuss the availability of the hardware
platform alone, and the other the availability of the complete
end-to-end service. Even the definition of complete end-to-end
service availability can vary greatly, and it is important to
understand exactly how any availability requirements are to be
measured. For example, consider:
● If all hardware and software on the primary server is
functioning correctly and user connections are ready to be
accepted by the application, the solution might be
considered 100 percent available.
● If there are 100 users but 25 percent are unable to connect
due to a local network failure, is the solution still
considered 100 percent available?
● If only one user out of the 100 is able to connect and
process work, is it only 1 percent available?
● If all 100 users are able to connect but the service is
degraded with only two out of three customer transactions
being available, or there is very poor performance, how
does this affect availability measurements?

The period over which availability is to be measured can also

have significant impact on the definition of availability. A
requirement for 99.9 percent availability over a one-year period
allows 8.8 hours of downtime. A requirement for 99.9 percent
availability over a rolling four-week window only allows 40
minutes downtime in each period.
10 Service Management Function Guide

The customer should define availability in his or her own terms.

The availability manager should strive to educate and make sure
that he or she fully understands the terminology and that the end
result is realistic. The customer takes more ownership for the
consequences when they have been allowed to determine the
measurement criteria.
It is also necessary to identify and negotiate periods of downtime
for planned maintenance activity, technology upgrades, and the
introduction of new business function. The amount of planned
downtime that can be tolerated by the customer again has a
significant impact on the definition of availability requirements.

Propose Availability Solution

Now that the availability objectives for the critical business
functions within an IT service have been identified and their
relative importance and financial implications clearly
understood, the task of designing an overall IT infrastructure that
delivers the required levels of availability can begin.
This overall design process is not unlike traditional development
methodologies. Availability management is part of the
optimizing phase of MOF but often overlaps with the duties
performed in the envisioning phase of MSF. Availability
management is responsible for setting appropriate, availability-
related requirements and standards so that a formal project,
managed through MSF, can ensure that IT services are built as
required.
The availability design process often involves a number of
iterations between the preceding requirements definition phase
and the analysis and design phase. The availability goals and
budgetary constraints defined during the requirements phase
may prove to be unachievable and need to be passed back for re-
negotiation with the customer.
The first step in the availability design process is to identify the
major IT technology components, infrastructure, people, and
processes that underpin the complete end-to-end delivery of
service for each of the critical business functions and transactions
to be protected.
The complete life cycle of each of these components can then be
considered in detail with a view to designing a highly available
IT infrastructure and support environment. There are then two
main design processes to be undertaken: designing for
availability and designing for recovery.
 Availability Management 11

Designing for availability can be thought of as a pro-active task

where the focus is on keeping the IT service running and
preventing service outages from occurring or reducing the
impact of failures on the service being provided.
Designing for recovery is predominantly a re-active task that
aims to diagnose and recover service as quickly as possible if it
actually fails or becomes degraded in some manner.

Identify Major Information Technology Service Components

During the first step in the availability design process, it is useful
to break down the end-to-end provision of any service into
manageable pieces and to examine each of these pieces in turn.
MOF breaks down the overall infrastructure that makes up and
supports an IT service into the following IT domains:
● Service
● Application
● Middleware
● Operating system
● Hardware
● Network
● Facilities
● Egress

Design for Availability

The complete life cycle of each IT component identified above
can now be considered in detail with a view to maximizing the
availability that is delivered by it.
The appropriateness, reliability, maintainability, and
serviceability of each IT component can now be examined in
detail and considered from two major perspectives:
● Availability risks and countermeasures.
● Life cycle management needs.
12 Service Management Function Guide

Availability Risks and Countermeasures

All risks to the availability of each IT component need to be
considered and appropriate countermeasures designed to
mitigate them.
The nature of the availability risks faced by an IT component
varies according to the MOF IT domain the component resides
in.
Examples of availability risks by IT domain are:
● Application, middleware, and operating system domains:
● Single point of failure.
● Incorrect configuration option.
● Design flaw.
● Poor development methodology.
● Coding error.

● Hardware and network domains:

● Single point of failure.
● Out of date firmware.
● Poor documentation.
● Vendor support quality.
● Lack of anti-static precautions.
● Lack of spares.
● Poorly labeled cabling.

● Facilities domain:
● Insufficient air-conditioning capacity.
● Power outages.
● Power surges and spikes.
● Fire and flood.
● Physical security.

● Egress domain:
● Single power feed from utility.
● Single communications feed from Telco.

● Personnel:
● Poor quality procedures.
● Lack of discipline.
● Lack of skills.
 Availability Management 13

Availability management and service continuity management are

closely related. Both processes strive to eliminate risks to the
availability of IT services and employ the use of countermeasures
to achieve this. The prime focus of availability management is in
handling the routine risks to availability that can be reasonably
expected to occur on a day-to-day basis. Service continuity
management caters to more extreme and relatively rare
availability risks, such as fire and flood, and also acts as a catchall
for any unanticipated availability risks.
Service level management impacts both service continuity
management and availability management. Service level
management takes primary responsibility for interfacing with
customers and determining which IT services are most crucial to
the survival of the company, and which alternate means of
conducting business are employed if they fail for a prolonged
period.
Availability management draws on this prioritization work and
takes it a stage further by identifying the key IT infrastructure
components that support these critical services and determining
whether they contain any single points of failure or other risks to
availability that can be cost-effectively addressed through the use
of appropriate countermeasures.
Where no straight-forward countermeasures are available or
where the countermeasure is prohibitively expensive or beyond
the scope of a single IT service to justify in its own right, then
these availability risks are passed to service continuity
management to handle.
14 Service Management Function Guide

Within each IT domain, there are specific risks to availability that

are considered too unlikely to justify the cost of mitigating them,
or there are risks that were not anticipated. For example, few
data centers anticipate a meteor shower on the building. Of those
that do, few spend the money to install anti-meteor shielding. In
these situations, service continuity management outlines what
must be done to restore service. There need not be a separate
service continuity plan for each risk. One plan can cover the risks
of flood, fire, meteors, terrorist attack, and any other eventuality
that might disable a complete data center. There always needs to
be a service continuity plan in place, even where there is also an
availability plan in place to handle more routine issues.
As with an earlier example, an individual power supply within a
server can be expected to fail at some stage. A very effective and
inexpensive countermeasure that can be employed by availability
management is the adoption of server technology incorporating
hot-plug redundant power supplies. This technology allows a
second power supply to seamlessly take over from the failing
unit and for the failed unit to be replaced on-line without any
interruption to the IT service. Service continuity management
needs to plan for situations where both power supplies fail at the
same time, or where the second fails while the first is being
repaired. This is a much more unlikely scenario, but must be
planned for.
The following figure summarizes the relationship between
availability management and service continuity management
with regards to the identification and mitigation of availability
risks.
 Availability Management 15

Service level management

Identify critical IT services

Identify minimum business

requirements

Availability Service continuity

management management

Identify key customer

functions within each
critical IT service Identify common
infrastructure risks
common to multiple
Identify key IT critical IT services
components

Identify availability risks

and single points of failure

Is failure NO
expected and the Create contingency plan
countermeasure
affordable?

YES
Design and implement
countermeasure

Incident occurs

Is there a NO
countermeasure
and did it work?

Invoke contingency plan

YES
NO
Was service fully
restored in time
frame allowed?

YES

Business as usual

Figure 2
Relationship between availability management and service continuity
management
16 Service Management Function Guide

When an availability risk is identified and confirmed as falling

within the scope of availability management, the next step is to
identify an appropriate countermeasure that can be deployed to
minimize the exposure to the IT service.
It is important to ensure that any countermeasures employed are
affordable and can be cost-justified in relation to the cost of
downtime that has already been agreed with the customer.
Availability management strives to provide an optimum level of
availability within the cost constraints imposed by the customer.
A countermeasure may be only partially effective by design. For
example, a stand-by system may have only half the processing
capacity of the primary system. Whether this is acceptable
depends on the definition of availability agreed upon with the
customer.
Where a particular risk cannot be addressed at an appropriate
cost, then one of the following must occur:
● The availability goals need to be re-negotiated with the
customer.
● A strategy of rapid-recovery needs to be adopted (with its
associated impact on availability levels).
● The issue must be passed over to service continuity
management and any resulting outage handled as an
exception/disaster.

Although service continuity management provides contingency

plans to handle any disaster, these may involve a prolonged
period of downtime before the IT service is fully restored. This
factor needs to be taken into consideration during re-negotiation
with the customer.
Such iterative cycles of customer need, risk identification, and
design implication may need to be followed several times during
the design and implementation of a highly available IT service.

Life Cycle Management Needs

The full life cycle management requirements for maximum
availability of each IT component must be determined. Then, the
appropriate roles and responsibilities, tools, processes, and
procedures can be designed into the supporting IT infrastructure
along with the necessary staffing levels and skill requirements to
carry them out.
 Availability Management 17

The aim is to identify any operational task that can be

undertaken to maximize the availability of the IT component,
such as fast startup and shutdown times, and attending to
housekeeping needs in a timely fashion. Opportunities for
performing periodic health-checks and other pro-active
monitoring must be explored and the need for custom
instrumentation or specific tooling considered.
Such management needs for each IT component includes efficient
handling of:
● Startup and shutdown, including subsystem dependencies.
● Monitoring.
● End-to-end health-checks.
● Housekeeping/administration.
● Password maintenance.

● Consumable replacement methodology.

● Backup and restore methodologies.
● Emergency patch methodology.
● Upgrade and change methodology.
● Opportunities to exploit on-line backup and on-line
configuration features.
● Fail-over and fail-back requirements.
● Skills required to operate, monitor, and diagnose.
● Event generation and handling requirements.
● Configuration documentation required.
● Up-to-date vendor documentation.

To maximize the availability of the IT service, management

processes and an IT infrastructure that support the operational
needs of underlying IT components must be designed. Such a
design encompasses the roles and responsibilities of the various
groups involved, the tools and techniques they employ, and the
specific tasks both real-time and off-line required to keep the IT
component operational. The design must also be able to deal
with both routine expected problems and failure scenarios. Any
requirements for invasive maintenance needs to be scheduled in
accordance with the agreed service windows and included
within internal and external contracts and SLAs.
18 Service Management Function Guide

Design for Recovery

No matter how well designed and managed, problems with the
delivery of an IT service can still occur. The second major design
consideration for high availability is a reactive one charged with
recovering service as quickly and efficiently as possible. The
incident being dealt with may be the result of an unexpected
event or even the failure of a countermeasure to protect the
service. Rapid recovery may also be the appropriate design
choice for a particular availability risk if an effective
countermeasure proves to be too expensive for the customer to
justify.
Efficient incident detection and recovery mechanisms are also
required during less extreme situations, as even minor problems
need to be handled appropriately to prevent knock-on errors
from escalating further down the chain. In the case of dual
redundant power supplies, any failed primary component clearly
needs to be identified and replaced before the secondary unit
also fails and results in total loss of service.
As illustrated in the following figure, every incident moves
through these life cycle stages:
● Incident start
● Incident detection
● Incident diagnosis
● Incident repair
● Incident recovery
● Normal service restoration

Incident
occurs
Normal service
resumed

Detected & Investigated Resolved &

Classified Closed
recorded & diagnosed recovered

End to end ownership, tracking and monitoring

Figure 3
Incident life cycle
 Availability Management 19

The time taken during each of these stages affects the overall
period of downtime due to this incident and the availability of
the IT service as a whole. Designing for recovery is concerned
with the efficient handling of each stage in this life cycle for every
IT component involved in the support of critical business
functions and transactions.

Incident Life Cycle

The following figure shows the relationship between each of the
incident life cycle stages and how the amount of time spent in
each stage affects the overall period of downtime and the
availability of the IT service as a whole.

Duration of incident
(downtime)
Elapsed
time to Response Repair Recovery Time between failures
detection time time time (uptime)

Total time between incidents

Incident Detection Diagnosis Repair Recovery Restoration New incident

starts starts

Time

Figure 4
Incident life cycle showing time between failures

The existence of one or more countermeasures may alleviate

some or all of the negative impacts of an availability incident, but
the overall recovery life cycle remains predominantly the same.
The repair and recovery processes may be altered as, by
definition, service is still being provided by the IT infrastructure
and this may restrict the nature of some of the diagnostic and
recovery attempts that are allowed. In addition, reverting back
from the countermeasure to normal running may involve
scheduled downtime and this needs to be negotiated with the
customer. In both cases, the duration of the incident is be
artificially lengthened but this actually serves to maximize
availability.
The role of designing for recovery is to examine each stage in an
incident’s life cycle and to minimize the time spent in each area.
This work should be undertaken from the following two main
perspectives.
20 Service Management Function Guide

Generic MOF Processes and Procedures

Clearly, the quality of the management processes within the
operating and supporting phases of the MOF process model is
crucial to the speed with which incidents are detected and
resolved. Designing for recovery needs to ensure that these
generic processes are of a sufficient level of maturity to support
the needs of the IT service being implemented.
Specific Needs of Each IT Component
Continuing with the earlier focus on the key components that
make up the IT service being considered, each of these
components needs to be considered in detail and their
requirements for optimum recovery analyzed and satisfied
throughout each stage of the incident life cycle.
Following is a detailed description of each stage of the incident
life cycle, including examples of relevant availability design
considerations:
Incident Start
The moment that a business function or transaction becomes
unavailable or degrades beyond the definition of availability
agreed with the customer. This could be due to a failure of an IT
component, environmental problems such as power failure, an
application error, or human error such as inadvertently shutting
down the wrong server.
Incident Detection
The moment that the IT organization becomes aware of the
problem.
This is typically through the generation and receipt of an error
message or some other audible or visual alert. Efficient event
handling mechanisms need to be in place to ensure that the
incident is identified as soon as possible and is not lost among
other “noise” events. Pro-active threshold alerting provides
advance notice of performance and capacity issues. Ideally, the
IT component itself will be instrumented to advise of warning
conditions.
Although inevitable with respect to certain failure types, the
worst scenario from an availability perspective is to rely on the
user calling in to report an outage.
 Availability Management 21

Incident Diagnosis
The moment at which the true cause has been identified as
opposed to any initial symptoms. Diagnosis includes the time
taken to respond to the detected event and to identify
appropriate resources to work on identifying the cause and to get
them into a position where they can interact with the system.
Once engaged, specialists need access to a knowledge base of
known problems, accurate configuration information, recent
change history, appropriate diagnostics tools, and an effective
escalation path and contacts list.
Incident Repair
The moment at which any underlying failure or system issue has
been repaired or worked around.
Using the earlier incident examples, repair might mean the
replacement of an IT component, the restoration of power,
implementation of an emergency application fix, or the restart of
a server. Considerations include off-hours call rotation,
appropriate contracts with internal groups and external vendors,
spare equipment on site, and so on.
Repair does not mean that the IT service is fully available once
more or indeed that it is even back up and running.
Incident Recovery
The moment at which any recovery has been completed and the
IT component is ready to resume normal processing.
For example, a replacement disk drive needs to have its data
restored either from backups or from an on-line process before it
can be used for production. Considerations include the provision
of detailed recovery processes for IT components and the
maintenance of appropriate interrelationships and dependencies.
Incident Restoration
The moment at which normal service is restored and the business
function or transaction becomes fully available.
This requires synchronization with the customer and a means of
communication with all users.
22 Service Management Function Guide

Designing for Customer Satisfaction During Outages

It is important to note that good customer satisfaction can still be
maintained at times of failure and despite periods of
unscheduled downtime. The key is to:
● Establish appropriate and realistic expectations during the
requirements definition phase of the availability
management life cycle.
● Articulate a clear understanding of the circumstances
under which the service can be expected to fail, and how
this is related to the resources being spent to protect it.

Clearly, if the IT service never approaches the levels of

availability agreed with the customer, then they have a right to
be dissatisfied. If the reasons for failure and the manner in which
the failures are handled fall within expectations, then satisfaction
is maintained.
An efficient process for handling and recovering from failures,
coupled with a good clear communication path to the customer,
is required. The customer needs to be kept informed at regular
intervals during any recovery processing. Realistic timescales
need to be given for when the service is expected to resume.

Management Processes
Many of the considerations for availability in regard to
management processes are already covered by previously
mentioned availability design activities. The impact on the
availability of IT services of the management processes within
the MOF model is significant enough to warrant separate
mention.
Availability management needs to ensure that the MOF
processes used for the support of critical IT services are mature
enough and have the necessary people, skills, and tools to
effectively undertake their respective responsibilities. The design
process should look in detail at each of the management
processes involved in the support of the IT service being
considered.
An effective tool to help with this responsibility and also with the
complete availability design process is an availability review or
assessment service from an outside organization specializing in
availability management, ITIL, and MOF. Such a service can help
establish a baseline of maturity for any existing IT infrastructure
and compare and contrast this to the needs of new or existing IT
services being deployed.
 Availability Management 23

Formalize Operating Level Agreements

When IT and the customer agree on a cost-effective level of
availability, the agreement needs to be formalized in a document
called an operating level agreement (OLA). The OLA serves as
one of the building blocks for the SLA between IT and the
customer. The SLA is a two-way written agreement between an
IT Service Provider and the IT customer(s), defining the key
service targets and responsibilities of both parties. The OLA is an
agreement between internal IT service providers.
The agreed upon understanding and definition of availability,
the mechanism for reporting availability back to the customer,
the degree of granularity required, the format and style of
presentation, and the frequency of reporting need to be formally
agreed upon.
With regards to new IT services and the introduction of major
change, the availability goals and metrics agreed upon with the
customer must be turned into an effective set of acceptance test
criteria to help prove that any new systems and support
infrastructure being deployed are capable of meeting the goals
and objectives that have been set for them. This work also
includes acceptance tests for the role of availability management
and its ability to effectively monitor and report on the new IT
service.
24 Service Management Function Guide

The OLA needs to include:

● A definition of the business processing provided.
● Importance to the organization.
● The number of users.

● The business impact of downtime or unavailability.

● The cost of downtime or unavailability and how these costs
change over time.
● Hours of service required.
● Critical periods of service: peaks, month-end, deadline
processing and so on.
● Less critical periods of service where downtime is more
tolerable.
● Scheduled downtime periods for planned maintenance and
upgrades.
● Length of time downtime can be tolerated before
contingency plans need to be invoked.
● How availability is to be measured, including:
● Definition of up-time.
● Definition of downtime.
● Minimum performance characteristics required.
● Minimum access points to be provided.

● How availability is to be reported to the business and how

often.

This work is undertaken in close cooperation with the service

level management function, as the service level manager is
ultimately responsible for the negotiation and documentation of
service levels with the customer.
 Availability Management 25

Roles and Responsibilities

Principal roles and their associated responsibilities for
availability management have been defined according to
industry best practice. Organizations might need to combine
some roles, depending on organizational size, organizational
structure, and the underlying SLAs existing between the IT
department and the business it serves.

Availability Manager
Main Responsibilities
The availability manager is responsible for managing the
activities of the availability management process. This individual
is responsible for ensuring that any given IT service delivers the
levels of availability agreed upon with the customer and for
interfacing with all other management processes in pursuit of
this goal.
The availability manager:
● Ensures customer requirements are correctly translated
into realistic availability goals.
● Ensures appropriate IT budgets are established for
protecting the service.
● Oversees planning activities in relation to designing for
availability and designing for recovery.
● Ensures that all risks to availability are identified and
appropriately handled.
● Undertakes availability modeling to help select the most
appropriate countermeasures, assesses the impact of future
changes, and identifies potential improvements.
● Implements cost-effective countermeasures to single points
of failure where possible.
● Ensures that remaining gaps are identified to the customer
and ultimately handled by service continuity management
when required.
● Ensures that the overall IT infrastructure is mature enough
to support the availability needs.
26 Service Management Function Guide

Defines the need for and helps with the implementation of

availability monitoring processes and tools.
● Ensures availability goals are reflected within appropriate
service level agreements both inside and outside the
company.
● Manage the day-to-day availability requirements of
services.
● Collects and interprets availability metrics on behalf of the
customer.
● Forecasts the impact of future availability requirements.

● Participates personally or through a delegate in the change

advisory board to review the availability impact of
proposed business and infrastructure changes.
● Manages a continuous availability improvement process.
● Provides consulting expertise for the review and creation
of any external contracts that include availability clauses.
 Availability Management 27

Relationship to Other Processes

Availability management is one of the foundational service
management functions (SMFs) in the MOF optimizing quadrant.
This quadrant seeks to negotiate SLAs with customers and
optimize the IT infrastructure, possibly initiating requests for
changes (RFCs) to the IT infrastructure. The list of SMFs in the
MOF optimizing quadrant is shown below.

Figure 5
Microsoft Operations Framework optimizing quadrant

Service Level Management

Service level management negotiates and manages SLAs and
OLAs, of which availability is a component.
From an availability perspective, service level management takes
primary responsibility for interfacing with the customer and
determining which IT services are most crucial to the survival of
the company. Availability management draws on this
prioritization work and:
● Identifies the key IT infrastructure components that
support these critical services.
● Determines whether they contain any single points of
failure or other risks to availability that can be cost-
effectively addressed through the use of appropriate
countermeasures.

Where no straight-forward countermeasures are available or

where the countermeasure is prohibitively expensive or beyond
28 Service Management Function Guide

the scope of a single IT service to justify in its own right, then

these availability risks are passed to service continuity
management to handle.

Financial Management
Financial management acts a filter, ensuring that solutions
proposed by availability management, capacity management, or
service continuity management can be justified in terms of their
cost to implement versus their benefit to the customer. Financial
management strives to monitor, control, and, if necessary,
recover costs incurred by the IT organization.

Workforce Management
Whenever a new technology is introduced into the IT
environment, the people that run that technology must be
properly trained and motivated. Workforce management ensures
that existing personnel are trained and ready to operate a new
availability solution when it is ready.

Service Continuity Management

Availability management and service continuity management are
closely related as both processes strive to eliminate risks to the
availability of IT services. The prime focus of availability
management however, is handling the routine risks to
availability that can be expected on a day-to-day basis such as the
failure of a hardware component. Service continuity
management caters to the more extreme and relatively rare
availability risks such as fire or flood.

Capacity Management
Capacity management ensures that appropriate IT resources are
available to meet customer requirements by planning for
additional resources as current system resource use begins to
near the point of full capacity. Availability management has a
very close tie to this process, since optimal use of IT resources to
meet performance levels at a justifiable cost relates to the result
of effective availability management. Availability reporting and
measurement highlight availability trends indicating capacity or
performance issues.

Change Management
Capacity management ensures that appropriate IT resources are
available to meet customer requirements by planning for
additional resources as current system resource use begins to
near the point of full capacity. Availability management has a
very close tie to this process, since optimal use of IT resources to
 Availability Management 29

meet performance levels at a justifiable cost relates well to the

result of effective availability management. Availability
reporting and measurement highlight availability trends
indicating capacity or performance issues.
30 Service Management Function Guide

Contributors
Many of the practices that this document describes are based on
years of IT implementation experience by Accenture, Avanade,
Microsoft Consulting Services, Fox IT, Hewlett-Packard
Company, Lucent Technologies/NetworkCare Professional
Services, and Unisys Corporation.
Microsoft gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of
these organizations in providing material for this document.
Program Management Team
William Bagley, Microsoft Corporation
Jeff Yuhas, Microsoft Corporation
Lead Writers
James Westover, Hewlett Packard Corporation
Ashley Hanna, Hewlett Packard Corporation
Contributing Writers
William Bagley, Microsoft Corporation
Vicky Howells, Fox IT
Jeff Yuhas, Microsoft Corporation
Editors
Patricia Rytkonen, Volt Technical Services
Sybil Wood, Volt Technical Services