EXAM - Availability Management

Availability Management is responsible for availability of the:

A. Services and Components

B. Services and Business Processes

C. Components and Business Processes

D. Services, Components and Business Processes

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Answer: A

Availability Management is the practice of identifying levels of IT Service availability for use in Service Level Reviews with Customers.
All areas of a service must be measurable and defined within the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
To measure service availability the following areas are usually included in the SLA:

• Agreement statistics – such as what is included within the agreed service.
• Availability – agreed service times, response times, etc.
• Help Desk Calls – number of incidents raised, response times, resolution times.
• Contingency – agreed contingency details, location of documentation, contingency site, 3^rd party involvement, etc.
• Capacity – performance timings for online transactions, report production, numbers of users, etc.
• Costing Details – charges for the service, and any penalties should service levels not be met.

Availability is usually calculated based on a model involving the Availability Ratio and techniques such as Fault Tree Analysis, and includes the following elements:

• Serviceability – where a service is provided by a 3^rd party organisation, this is the expected availability of a component.
• Reliability – the time for which a component can be expected to perform under specific conditions without failure.
• Recoverability – the time it should take to restore a component back to its operational state after a failure.
• Maintainability – the ease with which a component can be maintained, which can be both remedial or preventative.
• Resilience – the ability to withstand failure.
• Security – the ability of components to withstand breaches of security.

ITIL V3 Certification Path

So you just passed Foundation exam and wish to continue your ITIL development but you are confused and don't know what to do next?

Well, you are not alone. ITIL has one of the most confusing certification schemes on the market with multiple pathways and, to be quite blunt, rather strange credit scheme.

So let's see where we stand...

Basically, there are 5 levels of qualifications:

• ITIL Foundation
• ITIL Intermediate Level   
• ITIL Managing Across the Lifecycle
• ITIL Expert Level
• ITIL Master Qualification

Assuming you have successfully passed Foundation exam, Intermediate level is the next logical step and this is where things start to get complicated.

Inside intermediate level there are two ways you can take:

• Service Lifecycle
• Service Capability

Service lifecycle is for you if you are working in management or if you are team leader and it contains following modules:

• Service Strategy Qualification 
• Service Design Qualification
• Service Transition
• Service Operation Qualification
• Continual Service Improvement

On the other hand if you are working as a process manager or are more focused on  day-to-day execution of ITIL practices, the Service Capability modules is the way to and they contain:

• Service Offerings and Agreements 
• Release, Control and Validation
• Operational Support and Analysis
• Planning, Protection and Optimization

However, if you want to get the next stage of ITIL qualification, one of these streams is simply not enough because of the above mentioned unique credit system.

Basically, ITIL Managing Across the Lifecycle qualification is a go-between the Intermediate qualification and ITIL Expert Level and is concerned with the knowledge required to implement and manage the necessary skills associated with use of the Lifecycle practices.

ITIL Expert level of qualification is aimed at those individuals who are interested in demonstrating a superior level of knowledge of the ITIL Scheme in its entirety.