AVAILABILITY, RELIABILITY OR MAINTAINABILITY INDEX INCLUDING OUTAGE CHARACTERIZATION

Improved reliability, availability and/or maintainability metrics have been developed that account for customer perceived factors such as frequency of outage, duration of outages, business impact of outages, etc. In various realizations and exploitations, such improved metrics may be utilized for managing and/or monitoring availability of enterprise information services or suites, availability of individual computers, devices or facilities, and/or availability of particular functionality or subsystems of any of the above. In one exploitation, personnel management decisions and/or compensation levels may be based on achieved values for such improved metrics. In other exploitations, contractual commitments and/or incentive fees related to an installed system or systems may be based on such improved metrics.