Before you apply IT Service Level Management hot fix 21LM01, you should review the information below in order to determine if your contract database has availability "holes" by submitting the sample program provided, and set the new macro variable FILL_AVAILABILITY_WITH accordingly.

For example, suppose the data for one ETL run ended with an observation for 10:00, and the next ETL run began with data for 11:00. The time between 10:00 and 11:00 should be marked as unavailable, since no other representation of availability is appropriate to infer for a time period that has clearly been passed.

However, the ITSLM software did not construct rows of data to this inferred time of unavailability. Therefore, the absence of these rows of data creates "holes" in the availability data. These holes act as missing values instead of zero when computing availability, and this results in a possibly inaccurate availability indicator value.

For a more in-depth discussion of how missing values affect the calculation of availability, see the discussion about Scheduled and Excused Outages in Appendix 3 - Outages, in the SAS IT Service Level Management User's Guide. This is available online at

This problem has been corrected in ITSLM HF21LM01 with respect to any new data brought into the contract database. However, the "holes" that are already in the contract database must be addressed. Essentially there are two choices, as follows:

• Continue to treat the holes as missing values

  This approach fills the holes with missing values. This may be an appropriate choice if prior time periods in the contract database have already beenreported and accepted by all parties. You might want to create scheduled or unscheduled outages to ensure that these holes remain filled in with missing values. The program to determine if there are holes will provide a report to assist in aligning these outages (see below).

• Fill the holes with zero uptime values

  This approach fills the holes with uptime set to 0. This will cause synchronizationto re-compute the availability indicators in the contract hierarchy, including re-summarizing the data to the DAY, WEEK, MONTH, and YEAR summary time periods. This approach corrects the data to conform to the same rules that would apply to any gaps encountered in ETL. Note that depending upon the size and complexity of your contract this may cause a lengthy one-time synchronization task run. Additionally, all reports for this contract will be flagged for regeneration, so the initial reporting job may also execute longer than normal.

The actual correction of the data in the contract database occurs when the contract database is upgraded. This happens the first time the synchronize task is run for a contract after installing HF21LM01, whether in batch (via ACTION=SYNC on the %CPSLMETL macro invocation) or via the GUI (Tools -> Synchronize). The synchronize task is implicitly run as part of an ETL run.

When the upgrade occurs, one of four things can happen:

1. If no availability holes exist in the contract database, the data is not changed.
2. If availability holes exist in the contract database they are filled with missing values. This is done if you assign the macro variable FILL_AVAILABILITY_WITH the value of MISSING prior to running the synchronize task.
3. If availability holes exist in the contract database they are filled with zero uptime values. This is done if you assign the macro variable FILL_AVAILABILITY_WITH the value of ZERO prior to running the synchronize task.
4. If availability holes exist in the contract database and no directive has been given on how to fill them (by assigning a value to the FILL_AVAILABILITY_WITH macro variable) then the task will ed to the synchronize log as well as the SAS log, indicating that the user needs to specify an appropriate value for theFILL_AVAILABILITY_WITH macro variable.

Part 2 of this note can be found in note #017439

Select the Hot Fix tab in this note to access the hot fix for this issue.

Operating System and Release Information

A fix for this issue for SAS IT Service Level Management 2.1 is available at: