ITIL Availability Compliance

Developed in the late 1980's, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has become the worldwide de facto standard in Service Management. Starting as a guide for UK government, the framework has proved useful to organisations in all sectors through its adoption as the basis for Service Management, as well as consultancy, education and software tools support. Today, ITIL is known and used worldwide.
As a company that specialises in the provision of High Availability IT management solutions, Itheon can help organisations become compliant with the methodologies and best practices of ITIL. Itheon does this through the use of tools that constantly manage and monitor the performance of the IT environment and also measure the quality of service and the impact the IT is having on the business.
Below are excerpts/statements from the ITIL 'Best Practice for IT Service Delivery' book together with Itheon responses.

Why Service Level Management?

Service Level Management Section 4 (page 27)

ITIL Management Statement from the ITIL Library 4.1.1: 'Service Level Management (SLM) is essential for any organisation so that the level of IT Service needed to support the business can be determined, and monitoring can be initiated to identify whether the required service levels are being achieved - and if not, why not.'

Itheon Response: Itheon solutions' major goal is to fit the ITIL Methodology of Availability and Quality of Service. The Itheon suite of tools has been developed with a proactive approach to the monitoring and management of the metrics of your Service Level Agreement.

Goal for SLM

Service Level Management Section 4 (page 27)

ITIL Management Statement from the ITIL Library 4.1.1 (Goal for SLM): 'The goal for SLM is to maintain and improve IT Service quality, through a constant cycle of agreeing, monitoring and reporting upon IT Service achievements and instigation of actions to eradicate poor service - in line with business or cost justification. Through these methods, a better relationship between IT and its customers can be developed.'

Itheon Response: Each SLA will have its own set of differing metrics, so it is necessary to deploy tools to measure compliance with the SLA whilst ensuring that Quality of Service is built in. For example, there is the linkage between response times and availability. If your SLA is showing 100% availability of your IT services but users are experiencing slow response times then the quality of service is in dispute. If your SLA has been written, only, in terms of availability you still have a problem - there comes a point where response time is so poor that the service must be regarded as unavailable.
There is no doubt that without monitoring an SLA and any other metrics that might show valuable trends the SLA might as well not exist. Itheon provides tools that allow for the provision of meaningful reports and graphs on the SLA metrics to the customer on a regular basis.

This helps you:

The Cost of (Un)Availability

IT Availability Section 8 - (page 228)

ITIL Management Statement from the ITIL Library 8.4.2: 'The overall costs of an IT Service are influenced by the levels of Availability required and the investments required in technology and services provided by the IT support organisation to meet this requirement. Availability certainly does not come for free.'

Itheon Response: Itheon solutions are designed to increase high availability through automated problem management of servers, applications, networks and storage. This ability to automate the operation through detection and correction of problems can be a great benefit by helping to make more efficient use of IT staff time, and provide a higher level of computing service, thus increasing availability levels.

The need for a business and user focus

Availability Management Section 8 - (Page 211)

ITIL Management Statement from the ITIL Library 8.1.2: 'Given the business dependency on IT Availability, it is essential that the deployment of Availability Management has a strong business and User emphasis. This is to ensure that the IT Infrastructure delivers the required levels of Availability to support the vital business functions key to the business operation. It also ensures that Availability improvement opportunities are focused to deliver true User benefits. This requires Availability Management to understand the business and the User perspective of the IT Service provided.'

Itheon Response: Quality of Service from a User perspective is a major part of Itheon's mission. Measuring and Monitoring the Service of all key IT business components/services in relation to the User experience can be achieved through the utilisation of Itheon's Quality of Service solution.
It's important to define the elements that support the IT business services, and Itheon provides the ability to view your IT infrastructure through a business service centric view - thus providing a holistic view of IT as it relates to businesses, correlating IT components to their business services.

Systems Management

Availability Management Section 8 - (Page 240)

ITIL Management Statement from the ITIL Library 8.5.4: 'The provision of Systems Management tools positively influences the levels of Availability that can be delivered. Implementation and exploitation should have strong focus on achieving high Availability and enhanced recovery objectives.'
'In the context of recovery, such tools should be exploited to provide automated failure detection, assist failure diagnosis and support automated error recovery.'

Itheon Response: Itheon's Automated systems management software checks systems constantly for many potential problems from simple errors to more complex problems, and follows a sophisticated model of detection, diagnosis, alerts, fix, recovery and report.

Report generation and statistical analysis

Availability Management Section 8 - (Page 261)

ITIL Management Statement from the ITIL Library 8.8.3: 'Availability Management, once implemented and deployed, will be required to produce regular reports on an agreed basis, e.g. monthly Availability reports, Availability Plan, SOA status reports etc.'

'For reporting purposes organizational reporting standards should be used wherever possible. If these don't exist then IT standards should be developed so that IT reports can be developed using standard tools and techniques. This means that the integration and consolidation of reports will subsequently be much easier to achieve.'

Itheon Response: Itheon Reporting and Graphing is comprehensive in that it not only reports on the traditional components but also on the service being delivered. These reports and graphs can be viewed via the web and are essential for analysis of availability trends as part of the Availability Management.

IT Component downtime data capture and recording

Availability Management Section 8 - (Page 260)

ITIL Management Statement from the ITIL Library 8.8.1: 'the capture and recording of data pertaining to IT component downtime (planned and unplanned) is a key requirement for the forecasting and reporting of Availability. It would be usual to find this information available from the Service Desk, Problem Management and Change Management sections of the IT support organisation'.

'To improve the accuracy and quality of information it is recommended that component downtime detection and data recording be automated.'

Itheon Response: Itheon's solutions already encompass integration with manufacturers hardware monitoring solutions such as HP Insight Manager, IBM Netfinity, and HP Top Tools etc.

Guiding principles

Availability Management Section 8 - (Page 216)

ITIL Management Statement from the ITIL Library 8.2.2: 'Availability Management should not simply understand the Availability of each component. By taking a business and User perspective it is important to understand how each technology component supports the vital business functions upon which the business operation relies.'

'This is fundamental if Availability Management is to optimise the IT Infrastructure and supporting organisation to deliver the levels of Availability required by the business and to drive Availability improvements that deliver true business and User benefits.'

'Key Message - Availability Management needs to consider Availability from an IT Service perspective and from an IT component perspective. These are entirely different aspects. While the underlying concept is similar, the measurement, focus and impact are entirely different.'

Itheon Response: The Itheon solution offers a holistic view of IT as it relates to the business, correlating the IT components to the business services. When problems occur with any element of IT it's immediately clear which business services are affected. This way you are able to tell at a glance what is happening within the business and what the priorities are for problem resolution.

This means that the business impact of any given infrastructure problem can be seen at a glance, and a clear understanding of the health of the business is always visible. Additionally where SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are in place it's easy to see the state of compliance at a glance and also be able to assess the necessary steps needed to ensure compliancy.

 

Home · Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Site Map