Availability Manager Functions & AM Metrics

Availability Managers ensure that the service provided from the service catalog are met and delivered to the customer's utmost satisfaction. The primary responsibilities of the availability manager include:

1. Ensuring that all service deliveries fulfill and match the established SLA's
2. Ensure and categorize that all levels of availability of services, escalation and solutions are provided in time
3. Validating that final designs meet minimum required levels of availability
4. Assist in the exploration of all incidents and problems that cause availability issues.
5. Participate in the IT infrastructure design that entail hardware and software in relation to availability fulfillments.
6. Finally establish and use Availability metrics to measure availability, reliability and maintainability of services.

I think the last point entails a major percentage of the Availability manager's job and its important then to list the most commonly used metrics that a AM uses. To measure availability of a services one can subtract the amount of downtime from the Agreed service Time (AST), divide the result by the AST, and then multiply this number by 100 to obtain a percentage.

The reliability of a service can be measured in either MTBSI or MTBF which is mean time between service incidents and mean time between failures. To calculate the reliability of a service in MTBSI you divide the available time in hours by the number of breaks in service availability.

The maintainability of a service is measured in MTRS which is the mean time to restore a service. You calculate the MTRS by dividing the total downtime in hours by the number of service breaks.

On the note of delivering  the best service.

Sam Kurien