Vikahallinta

Vikahallinta, or fault management, refers to the set of practices and tools used to detect, diagnose, and restore services when faults affect the performance, reliability, or availability of a system. It is a core function within IT operations, network management, and industrial automation, supporting rapid recovery and minimizing collateral impact.

The goals of vikahallinta are to identify faults quickly, determine their root causes, coordinate timely remediation, verify that services are restored, and prevent recurrence. It encompasses proactive monitoring, alerting, incident handling, problem management, and change management. A key objective is to reduce mean time to detection, investigation, and repair, while maintaining service levels and data integrity.

Core processes typically involve real-time monitoring and event management to generate alerts, incident management to coordinate response, and problem management to perform root cause analysis and preventive actions. Change management and configuration management are often integrated to safely implement fixes and keep records of system state. Data sources include network and application monitoring, logs, performance metrics, and configuration data, analyzed with analytics tools and ticketing systems.

Vikahallinta is aligned with IT service management frameworks such as ITIL, where it interfaces with incident, problem, and change processes. In telecommunications, data centers, and critical infrastructure, automated fault detection and remediation are common to minimize downtime and improve reliability.

Key metrics typically include mean time to detect, mean time to acknowledge, mean time to repair, and overall service availability. Emerging trends include AI-assisted anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, and greater automation to reduce manual intervention.