Task: Monitor And Analyze Technology Availability Data

The Availability Manager must collate data and information pertaining to technology availability for analysis. This would include trends of events, incidents, problems and user feedback pertaining to technology availability. The Availability Manager must analyze reports from event, incident and problem management to gather data on outages of IT product components. This data must be analyzed to understand trends (if any) and identify root causes in case of non-conformance to the agreed availability targets. Target performance (in terms of service levels) may be compared with the actual performance to identify the areas of improvization. Past and current data analysis should be done by Availability Manager to predict future availability trends.

In addition, the technology architecture must also be analyzed for optimization opportunities. The Availability Manager must analyze existing infrastructure i.e. assets, application components, services etc. from an IT product perspective. The analysis should be done to identify weaknesses (if any) that would cause the component to slow down or even break down. Also, component dependencies must be checked to identify if failure of one component may have a cascading effect on other components. Opportunities for optimization must be identified. Component Failure Impact analysis" (CIFA) against services and Users can be done for the same.

Regular testing of all availability mechanisms must be done. Different availability mechanisms like ‘load balancing’, ‘grid computing’, mirroring, etc. must be tested in a regular and scheduled manner. This testing is done to obtain confidence that when a service or a component with in the IT infrastructure fails, the redundancy or mirroring designed works as needed. The test results should be analyzed to identify corrective actions or to suggest improvements to current technology landscape to improve technology availability. This should be done in coordination with the Continuity Manager, as the solutions could also be as part of DR tests and the outputs of those tests should be recorded.

The Availability Manager must also obtain any user feedback or complaints pertaining to technology availability and analyze the root cause for the same.