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

[Alan Prochaska]

HI Sameep,

What about a single service offering with multiple commitments?  We have an offering for cloud hosting, and then distinct commitments for prod (2h response) and non-prod (8h response).  Is that legal/kosher?  Will service availability still behave predictably?

Thanks for guidance.

Alan