Welcome to the Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) Community series!
This article will share information and answer FAQs about how service availability is measured and calculated in DPM.
What's availability? How is it calculated?
Service availability, or “uptime,” is the duration of time that a service is available to access and use. It’s expressed as a percentage. It helps you understand the reliability of your services and identify potential downtime or outages.
To calculate service availability, our system divides the total time a service is available by the total time it should be available (service commitment). Availability is calculated for service offerings and application services when a service commitment type "availability" is associated to them.
Note, when calculating service availability, our system ignores planned outages. Also, ongoing outages are ignored for calculations and an outage needs to have an end date to be calculated for availability.
More on that later! For more information, please see our documentation: Configure KPIs with service availability example.
[If the customer is familiar with ITOM/SRM, availability is a SLI, or service level indicator. SLIs are the actual metrics or measurements used to assess the performance or reliability of your service. SLIs are quantitative, objective indicators that provide insight into the health, availability, and responsiveness of your service. SLIs are tied to service level objectives (SLOs), as they’re the metrics used to measure whether your service is meeting its performance targets]
What is an outage?
An outage is a duration of time when a service isn’t available. For more information on Outages check out this community article - https://www.servicenow.com/community/itsm-articles/managing-outages-within-a-service-management-envi...
How is an outage different from an incident?
An outage is typically generated from an incident. For example, let’s say you’re tracking the service availability of the printers in your building. An employee goes to print a flyer, and notices that the printer isn’t working properly. They report it to IT, and an incident record is generated. That incident record signals the outage of your printer.
What are the different types of outages? Which is considered in the ITSM DPM Availability calculations?
There are 3 types of outages: Degradation, outages, and planned outages.
A degradation means that your service has been “degraded.” In other words, it’s slow or partially working, but not completely out or down. Let’s say that you have printers in several buildings. The employees in Building A have been printing documents all day, but an employee in Building B noticed that their printers are down. This is an example of a service degradation.
A planned outage is an outage that you planned.
When calculating service availability, DPM Availability KPI metrics ignore planned outages and degradations.
What's the difference between availability and committed downtime %?
The availability is the percentage of time that the service is up and accessible in total (independent of the commitment schedule).
Committed availability specifically refers to the expected availability for a commitment, given in days, hours, minutes, and seconds. It can be viewed through automated reports that are generated daily, using the system time zone. After an availability commitment is added, the system generates a year of availability records for that commitment, starting from the previous year.
Commitment availability percentage refers to the expected availability in relation to the commitment schedule. This is calculated by subtracting commitment downtime from commitment uptime and dividing the total by the committed uptime.
(Committed uptime - commitment downtime) / committed uptime
A committed downtime percentage refers to the percentage of time that the service is down and not available specifically in terms of the commitment schedule. Think about it this way: How long is the service committed to being available? The committed downtime relates to the downtime that counts against the commitment schedule.
What should I do if the availability data is missing?
- First, identify the KPI/PA indicator: Navigate to All > Digital Portfolio Management > KPI groups.
- Select the KPI group that has the missing availability data. The following are shipped KPI groups with availability: Performance snapshot, Portfolio success metrics, Service metrics, Outage and availability, and Availability insights.
- Select the "Availability" KPI. We ship DPM: SPM Availability and DPM: App Service Availability indicators.
- Next, check to see if the scoresheet is populated for the indicator by selecting the "Scores for this indicator" link in the Related Links section of the indicator record.
- Assess the scoresheet.
- If there are scores, debug in DPM by opening a case. Skip ahead to check if availability records exist.
- If there are no scores, check the scheduled job "DPM: Daily Data Collection."
- Next, check the DPM: Daily Data Collection job. Has the job been running?
- From the indicator record, select the “Jobs related list” at the bottom of the record.
- Select DPM: Daily Data Collection.
- Select the Job Logs related list at the bottom of the record. You should see entries in the list with the state as "Collected," a count greater than 1 in inserts, and no warnings or errors.
- If there are no entries, then go to the next step.
- If there are entries, then go to Step 8.
- Debug scheduled job.
- Check to see if the Active field is set to 'True'.
- If no, then set it to 'True' and click 'Execute now'.
- If yes, then go to All > System Scheduler > Scheduled jobs.
- Search '*DPM' in the Name column.
- Check the State column.
- If the State = Running, then you need to wait until the job finishes. In rare cases, the job will take multiple days to run. If so, make a case.
- If State = Ready, this means that the job ran. If scoresheet or analytics hub do not show data, debug PA configs by starting with Indicator to break down mappings.
- Check to see if the Active field is set to 'True'.
- From Step 6.e, navigate to All > Availability > Results (service_availability table). Check to see if there are records in the table.
- If yes, then verify that the availability data is as expected. Verify availability data matches the missing data. If so, investigate DPM config or open case.
- If no, verify availability data matches missing data, if so investigate DPM config or open case.
- Is the SPM Premium plugin installed?
- Navigate to All > System Definition > Plugins.
- Search for 'Service Portfolio Management Premium' (plugin id: com.snc.spm).
- Is it installed?
- If yes, Check the performance score computation.
- If no, Check availability calculation.
- Check the performance score computation
- Make sure scheduled job is on aka active = true.
- If it is Active, follow the Steps 4.3-4.6.
- If not Active, turn on the job.
- Make sure scheduled job is on aka active = true.
- Check the availability calculation.
- Make sure scheduled job is on aka active = true.
- If not Active, turn on the job.
- If it’s Active:
- Navigate to All > System Scheduler > Scheduled jobs.
- Search '*DPM' in the Name column.
- Check the State column.
- If the State = Running, then you need to wait until the job finishes. In rare cases, the job will take multiple days to run. If so, make a case.
- Make sure scheduled job is on aka active = true.
If you've gotten to this point and you're still stuck, please create a case.
