How does availability management work in ServiceNow? (details)

[Alan Prochaska]

Hi Nice, Knowledgeable, Experienced ServiceNow People, 

Who uses the service availability capabilities in IT Service Management?  Do they work well for you?  Any quirks, warnings, or lessons?

We're finding our way.

We're expecting to represent the availability requirements as a service commitment with references to a schedule and a service offering.  The service commitment would be type Availability and we'd enter the required percentage.  The schedule is a composite of schedule and schedule entry records.

1) If we have multiple applications whose availability requirements are the same (eg. M-F 6am-6pm), does each application need their own service commitment record?  or can we point all 10 to the same service commitment?  Will SN produce separate service availability records for each service offering related to the service commitment?

2) When we create outages, do we have to create them against the service offering?  or can we create them against the application (which would be related to the service offering)?  We want to ensure that SN will still compute the service availability records regularly and correctly.

Thanks for any help.

Alan Prochaska

Kaiser Permanente IT

[Sameep Kodia]

@Alan Prochaska  

1 - Yeah a single service commitment record can be attached to multiple service_offering records. Availability results generated per service offering per availability commitment.

2. - Availability is only calculated for service offering when attached to an outage on the main CI field or the Related CI's related list on the outage record. ServiceNow may add availability calculations on Application Services in the future as we have gotten many customer requests.

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Sameep

[Marida LH]

Sameep, where does Availability Management sit in the ServiceNow Platform? Is there a specific module that it forms part of and if so, could you please point me to more information about it?

[Sameep Kodia]

@Marida LH  - Starting Tokyo, it is in its own plugin called Availability (com.snc.availability). Pre Tokyo it was part of Service Portfolio Management plugin (com.snc.service_portfolio). Docs on this link will help.

[Marida LH]

Hi Sameep, I see that Xanadu offers quite a bit more when it comes to Availability, which is great.

I do want to ask - how do you ensure accurate Outage information (I couldn't see anything in the Xanadu release notes)?

As an IT Service Provider we are liable to potentially pay service credits and in some instances there can be quite severe implications where we fail to meet our Availability %'s. With such serious implications, you want accurate data and we know that where humans have to manually enter data, it is already at risk of not being accurate.

I found the below thread, but has ServiceNow come up with a better solution since?

Solved: Re: How to generate outage record automatically wh... - ServiceNow Community