Robert's approach to the question on Availability Management

I gave 8-points to the first part of the question and thus I imply that this part is less important than the second part. I would try to get 4-points on the definition and purpose and then 4-points on how Availability Management supports one other key ITIL discipline. Keys ones to consider are Service Level, Capacity and IT Service Continuity. Looking ahead, the second part of this question requires two closely related disciplines. I think of Capacity and IT Service Continuity as the most closely related so I will use them in part two. That means I will use Service Level Management in part one.

The 12-points allotted to part two means this is going to need to be more extensive than normal. Since you are limited to two disciplines, you need to get 6-points on each discipline. You can try to expand on Availability Management in this section, but that was already requested in part one so you are not likely to gain any points by elaborating further in this section.

Robert's Outline

• Part 1
  • Describe Availability Management
    • Monitoring is a key tool
    • Feeds into Service Level Management for SLA compliance
    • End-to-end monitoring to match user's view
    • Single-point-of-contact to end debates about network vs database, etc
    • Needs to be proactive and design into upgrades not retrofit
  • Essential support from Availability to Service Level
    • SLM does no monitoring, relies on Availability and Capacity
    • SIP is an SLM tool used by Availability to improve on SLA compliance
    • SLM is more people focused with Avail is more technical
• Part 2
  • Compare and contrast with Capacity
    • Both measure but Avail focuses on user perception which is Cap service
    • Cap also monitors low-level resources
    • Recommend sharing monitoring tools to minimize load on target server
    • Both have "Plans" to define strategy for maintaining and improving
    • Avail is proactive in designing availability into upgrades while Cap specifically has Business Capacity as a sub-discipline
    • Both need to be proactive but are likely to be reactive initially
  • Compare and contrast with IT Service Continuity
    • When Avail succeeds, ITSCM is not invoked
    • Simple disk drive redundancy in scope for Avail not ITSCM
    • Even data center redundancy can be absorbed into Avail when the network and resources are truly distributed, like multi-presence DNS
    • Both are scoped to focus on IT, not full business. Servers not paper clips
    • Typically ITSCM interfaces with BCM, while Avail goes through ITSCM
    • Avail provides daily feedback on user perception while ITSCM might remain perpetually invisible to users and customers