Service Availability Monitoring and Measurement Based on Customer Perception

Service availability management is a crucial area in IT service management. The expected availability of a given service is always defined in the SLAs (Service Level Agreements), which are the results of negotiation between customers and suppliers. How to monitor and measure the actual service availability more scientifically becomes critical, but it faces many challenges, probably the main challenge is that the availability should be consistent with the users' actual perceptions. To cope with the challenge, a monitoring and measuring model based on customer perception is proposed, which reflects and measures availability from the user perspective. This model is designed with low complexity and strong adaptability. The simulation shows that the availability obtained based on our model is close to the users' actual experiences. Moreover, it can be used to locate the range of the fault source and implemented with ease in ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) tools.