The Outage and Availability Reporting System was developed in support of the availability requirements that installations are writing into Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Typically, such SLAs include an availability clause. The Outage and Availability Reporting System includes:

• the ability to define users at varying levels of detail
• User hierarchies can be defined to represent the installation's internal organization. The hierarchies can be used to represent departments, offices, or even individual users. These represent political, more than technical hierarchies. The Outage and Availability Reporting System refers to the highest users as "Physical Sites".
• Users have calendars and service level targets, not the hardware or software items. Users are linked to items. In this way the criticality of items is determined based on the service levels of the users. It is dynamic, as users are added or their service levels change the service levels of items changes also.
• the ability to define hardware and software items
• Item hierarchies can be defined. These represent the technical relationships within a network or a software system. When an outage occurs on an item, all other items that are dependent on the first item also have an outage.
• Predefined calendars to represent when a user requires "prime" shift availability
• The ability to define any additional calendars as required to represent user requirements
• Users can have different calendars for host-based activities and for lan-based or local activities
• Holidays can be entered into the system. These effect all users and all hardware and software items. An outage during a holiday period is considered a non-prime outage.
• Outages are entered in relationship to hardware and software items, not to users.
• 'Pre-planned outages' can be entered. Outages during these periods are reported as non-prime time outages. The item hierarchy is used so that 'Pre-planned outages' are propagated through the system. That is when a hub has a scheduled outage, all hardware attached to the hub also has the pre-planned outage.
• To assist the help desk a table is available to look up all the hardware and software items that is used by the user.

Last Updated: Monday, 7 October, 2002