Managing Availability

You can use vFire Core to track and manage the availability of all CMDB entities. To your Users, 'Availability' is about whether or not they can use a service. When your User accesses the service within normal hours of use, is the service functioning as expected? Many of your services will rely on other services and vFire Core will enable you to keep track of all the supporting items.

The availability of services and items within your infrastructure has a significant impact on many areas of the organization. Benefits of tracking availability include:

• Ensuring User satisfaction by meeting service commitments
• Promoting the reputation of the IT department within the business
• Optimizing resources so that they are providing services when required rather than ensuring service availability across the board regardless of User needs.

Configuring Your Availability Settings

Before you can make the most of the availability functionality within vFire Core, you have to set up and configure your availability so that the system knows what you want to monitor.

There are three options within the System Administration menu that you can use to do this:

Availability Settings	to activate or deactivate the availability functionality, and configure it so that notifications will be sent when thresholds and escalations levels are breached
Outage Types	to create, rename and delete Outage Types which can then be used to raise and view outages
Schedule Definition	to create sets of availability schedules which can then be applied to items within the CMDB to track availability